Much like a psychic, a cinema critic must look through a movie and see the other side. In the case of the new thriller The Ring–a remake of the 1998 Japanese hit, Ringu–the formative forces swim into focus without effort. There’s a Dreamworks boardroom, some executives exclaiming that Shrek can’t…
Honestly, I’ve never been much into schmaltzy movies about the old neighborhood. The whole scene seems pretty hellish; all that cutesy talk about this good old street or that once-hoppin’ nightclub. Therefore, when it’s announced there’s a movie called Welcome to Collinwood about a bunch of Hollywood actors playing shticky…
It’s a family affair when widowed, repressed Lilia (Hiyam Abbas) and her spunky daughter Salma (Hend El Fahem) just can’t get enough of a suave drummer, Chokri (Maher Kamoun). This bold and lyrical first feature from Raja Amari expands the pat notion that middle-aged women just wanna have fun into…
More inspired by than adapted from Leo Tolstoy’s story “The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” Bernard Rose’s film is set in the very fast lane of a modern Hollywood that would have chilled the great Russian author to the bone. Ivan is a high-powered agent who snags a major actor as…
Part watered-down Neil LaBute, part Seinfeld episode (especially the one in which George’s fiancee licks the poison glue and dies) and part Waking Life, Just a Kiss follows a group of youngish couples (Ron Eldard, Kyra Sedgwick, Marisa Tomei, Patrick Breen and Taye Diggs, among others) in New York as…
Usually a master of creating aliens that go bump in the night, director David Twohy (Pitch Black) herein takes a turn toward ghosts and haunted houses, only this particular supernaturally afflicted domicile happens to be an American World War II submarine whose crew comes to the rescue of three survivors…
Think of the Sycamore family as the Munsters. The clan at the center of the effervescent production of You Can’t Take It With You now onstage at the WaterTower Theatre is a kooky bunch of lovable misfits occupying a spooky old two-story in Morningside Heights. With its stuffed animal heads…
Tony Hawk, since turning pro at 14, has made it seem possible to turn a passion into a career. Hawk is an icon, an innovator, an animated action star, a living legend adding another achievement to his résumé: a stunt circus. Employing other professional athletes such as Bucky Lasek (a…
With all the recent images of angry protesters and long bank lines, one would never know that the bustling boulevards of cosmopolitan Buenos Aires, Argentina, play host to bookstores and cafes that have served as havens for artists and intellectuals since the 1920s. Decades ago, a generation of transplanted Spanish…
Roger Avary’s screenplay for The Rules of Attraction is a remarkable work of literature: the disassembly and reconstruction of an impenetrable book by Bret Easton Ellis; a simplification and amplification of the 1987 novel’s attack on the bored, beautiful and wealthy; a streamlined and mainlined version of a story originally…
Good Lord, there hasn’t been this much blond hair on screen since the Von Trapp children sang and danced their way across the Alps in The Sound of Music. The fact that these latest golden locks belong to the likes of Michelle Pfeiffer, Robin Wright Penn and Renée Zellweger suggests…
In the past few years–more or less since the failure of his embarrassing Joan of Arc epic The Messenger–former wunderkind director Luc Besson has become a fantastically prolific writer/producer. (The IMDB claims he has nine projects lined up for next year.) His latest, The Transporter–a swift if sometimes ridiculous action…
Dallas gained a lot more than it lost the day civil rights lawyer Frank P. Hernandez shut down his practice and drove to New York City to talk his way into New York University’s film school. He never established himself as a filmmaker, yet the experience helped inspire the area’s…
When real magic happens on a stage, as it does in Quad C Theatre’s current production of A Clockwork Orange, an audience may undergo something akin to alchemy. We sit down as our normal, numbed-out selves, a little work-weary, or logy from the bowl of teriyaki grabbed before curtain time…
There are worse ways to spend a Sunday afternoon than viewing Pamela Joseph’s Sideshow of the Absurd, on view at the McKinney Avenue Contemporary. The State Fair midway is less entertaining and a lot pricier. The MAC is closer than Six Flags. It beats the History Channel, and the DMA,…
No one denies that a man’s head was smashed in, most likely with a camera tripod, on June 29, 1978, in an Arizona hotel room. No one denies that this same man was a porno freak, a maker and watcher and star of homemade sex films. No one denies he…
When everything from toothpaste to hair dye is touted as “age-defying,” when we will inject toxins to smooth wrinkles and lift, snip and tuck everything else, one gets the impression that we’re not all that thrilled with the thought of our own mortality. But even in such a youth-obsessed culture,…
It’s never my actual house, or any house I’ve lived in, but I clearly feel it is my home. I’m inside, walking through, a silent observer at first. The house is crowded with people, shoulder to shoulder; they laugh, dance, drink. I wander through them, not recognizing anyone. I say,…
The not-so-great American pastime of serial killing has splattered pop culture in recent years, but from the biopics of America’s Most Unwanted to the nervy theatricality of Anthony Perkins, Kevin Spacey or even David Byrne (whose Talking Heads song “Psycho Killer” says it all), only one legend stands definitive, that…
I might as well just come out and say it: Spirited Away is the best movie I’ve seen all year. Though it would be a masterpiece in any language, Hayao Miyazaki’s animated spectacular (and Japan’s highest-grossing film ever) is being released by Disney simultaneously in two versions–one in the original…
Where is the dividing line between romantic devotion and psychotic obsession? How can you know whether your romance is Titanic…or Fatal Attraction? Veteran Spanish writer-director Vicente Aranda (Lovers) uses the story of Queen Joan “the Mad” (1479-1555)–daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella, mother of Charles I of Spain (who became Emperor…
Brad Silberling’s instincts are right about half the time, which means that, depending on your point of view, his films are either half empty or half full. His last picture, 1998’s City of Angels, an American remake of Wim Wender’s poetic Wings of Desire, tried to marry European art-house cinema…
