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‘Estrada’s’ heavy irony weighs down morality tale
One need only look at Tommy Lee Jones and his sacky, care-worn eyes to pinpoint the maudlin essence of “The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada.” Directed by Jones from a script by ‘‘21 Grams'' screenwriter Guillermo Arriago, this is a rawly felt tale of grief, redemption and human callousness.
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Updated February 16, 2006

‘Freedomland’ suffers from sanctimonious view of racism
"Freedomland" is a big, ranting, screwed-up movie about how totally screwed up everything is. Set in a crucible of racial tension and child endangerment, it's the sort of self-important, alarmist melodrama that flaunts its Big Issues like a pair of cut-rate breast implants.
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Updated February 16, 2006

Sapphic ‘Imagine Me & You’ lacks imagination
After the brutal dramatic gravity of "Brokeback Mountain," watching "Imagine Me & You" is a little like jumping rope across the surface of the moon. Sure, it sounds nice, but writer-director Ol Parker's la-dee-da lesbian love story proves to be a decidedly sterile and weightless endeavor.
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Updated February 16, 2006

So Out Far! so good
This year's Out Far! Lesbian & Gay Film Festival bills itself as “10acious,” and the description is appropriate. For one thing, the festival began 10 years ago when the Lesbian & Gay Public Awareness Project dissipated and festival director Amy B. Ettinger “decided to keep it going.”
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Updated February 16, 2006

'States of Grace' fails to win conversion
Did you hear the one about the gangbanger, the porn starlet and the Mormon missionary? Mind you, "States of Grace" is no laughing matter. Set on the mean streets of Los Angeles, it could be the most grandiose and overwrought American drama since "Crash."
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Updated February 9, 2006

Ford defends the American family in 'Firewall'
In "Firewall," armed home invaders make white-collar dad Harrison Ford do their bidding by seizing the thing he holds most dear: His credit rating.
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Updated February 9, 2006

'Panther' remake is affront to a comedy classic
Pairing Steve Martin with his "Cheaper by the Dozen" director to remake "The Pink Panther" must — in the overall scope of things — be considered among the most horrendous ideas ever to take root in Hollywood. This is worse than any Pia Zadora movie, worse than Batman's bulging codpiece and a whole heck of a lot worse than a blond Bond.
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Updated February 9, 2006

Hopkins hits on all cylinders in 'World's Fastest Indian'
In "The World's Fastest Indian," Anthony Hopkins finally spits out the liver-and-fava-beans aftertaste of Hannibal Lecter. This is a deliciously pure and understated performance — arguably the actor's best — swaddled in a story of speed, daring and tenacity that literally will have you cheering in your seat.
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Updated February 2, 2006

Romance, race just enough to make 'Something New'
One can hardly distinguish the racial tension from the sexual tension in "Something New," and that — the smart, forcible coupling of taboos — is what makes this otherwise formulaic romantic comedy so giddily satisfying.
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Updated February 2, 2006

As 'Mrs. Henderson,' Judy Dench will move you
British aristocrat Laura Henderson (Judi Dench) has just lost her husband of many years. Staunch and dry-eyed throughout the funeral, Laura takes leave of her chauffeur, hops in rowboat and wades out to the middle of a pond, where she howls in grief and blubbers like a child.
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Updated February 2, 2006

‘Roving Mars': Even at IMAX size, nerds are still just nerds
In "Transamerica," Golden Globe winner Felicity Huffman performs a mind-boggling gender-juggling act: A woman playing a man doggedly trying to affect the mannerisms of a woman.
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Updated January 26, 2006

'Annapolis' fails to make the grade
Star James Franco is a student of the sensitive-rebel pout. He employs it as freely and emotively as any young actor since James Dean. The unafraid, impudent mouth, those soft yet baleful eyes ... whether he's playing Peter Parker's trust-fund nemesis in "Spider-Man" or wooing an Irish princess in "Tristan & Isolde," Franco will go to them without fail.
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Updated January 26, 2006

‘Holiday' romp ignores New Orleans tragedy
In "Transamerica," Golden Globe winner Felicity Huffman performs a mind-boggling gender-juggling act: A woman playing a man doggedly trying to affect the mannerisms of a woman.
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Updated January 19, 2006

'New World' discovers how to captivate
As a matter of artistic policy, filmmaker Terrence Malick is more interested in what his characters are feeling than doing, which explains how Malick's “The Thin Red Line” (1999) — billed as a war epic — could so fatally digress into an open-mic poetry jam.
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Updated January 19, 2006

Woody Allen finally scores again with 'Match Point'
"Match Point" marks a startling departure for Woody Allen in both substance and method. It was shot entirely in England — a first for Allen, whose phobia of all things non-Manhattan is enduring showbiz legend — and is the first Allen-directed movie since "The Sweet and Lowdown" (1999) that seems on a par with his best work.
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Updated January 19, 2006

‘Holiday' romp ignores New Orleans tragedy
A gust of wistful, tragic irony haunts "Last Holiday" in a way the filmmakers could never have intended and seem loath to acknowledge. It's the proverbial elephant in the room, and even a plus-sized comic talent like Queen Latifah is ill-equipped to conceal it.
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Updated January 12, 2006

'Glory Road' strains credibility
There was a time when a Jerry Bruckheimer movie meant something — namely, the promise of exploding cars flipping in midair like half-cooked hamburger patties. If we were lucky, there'd also be an Aerosmith power ballad and maybe a shirtless pickup game or two.
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Updated January 12, 2006

Brosnan is an ambiguous hit (man) in 'Matador'
Pierce Brosnan looks like he's having a grand old time in "The Matador," as well he should. Playing Julian Noble, a gone-to-seed hit man in the tackiest tight pants/gold chain ensemble this side of Tom Jones, the Irish actor is everything that a certain stirred-martini-disdaining secret agent is not. In the wake of his 007 ouster, the role must constitute a liberating change of pace.
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Updated January 12, 2006

Opening in 2006
Big budgets do not necessarily make for good back stories, a principle you'll find at work in the movie industry every day.
So instead of ranking the 2006 movie releases in terms of box-office potential, why not preview them in terms of buzz, controversy and good, old-fashioned tabloid allure? Can we do less?
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Updated January 5, 2006

And the winner is ...
When you heard earlier this month the Golden Globe nominations had been announced, didn’t you wish that it marked the end of the movie awards season, and not the beginning? Wouldn’t that be great? One announcement, one set of awards and it’s all over until next year.
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Updated December 29, 2005

Gripping 'Munich' takes Spielberg in yet another direction
"Munich” is a cracking spy thriller, an epic morality play and director Steven Spielberg's most mature (“Saving Private Ryan” notwithstanding) work to date. It marks the first time Hollywood's champion of populist cinema has allowed significant traces of moral and stylistic doubt to creep onto his palette, and how better to distinguish an artist from a mere showman?
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Updated December 22, 2005

Unsatisfying 'Rumor Has It' is no 'The Graduate'
It's sad to watch the fresh, photogenic faces of Jennifer Aniston and Mark Ruffalo accumulate so much egg in “Rumor Has It . . .,” a pasty, half-humored melodrama about a woman's right to have a premarital fling.
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Updated December 22, 2005

'Casanova' takes a light romp through the land of love
After capturing the fancy of critics worldwide as a taciturn gay cowboy in Ang Lee's “Brokeback Mountain,” Heath Ledger is the last actor you'd expect to see charming his way past 18th-century bodices in Lasse Hallstrom's “Casanova.”
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Updated December 22, 2005

Overlong ‘Producers’ is long on gay stereotypes, too
Flower-child Hitler is funnier than homo Hitler, and until someone convinces me otherwise I'll always feel grumpy about “The Producers,” an overlong movie musical based on the Broadway version of the most hilarious movie about Broadway ever made. So there.
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Updated December 22, 2005

Artful, beautiful ‘Geisha' lacks passion, personality
Much like the painted human baubles it depicts, Rob Marshall's “Memoirs of a Geisha” is elegant, artfully composed and drained of personality. That the film — starring Ziyi Zhang (“Hero”) as a simple fisherman's daughter who soars to the top of her profession in prewar Japan — looks and sounds lovely is beyond debate. What it lacks are the intangibles: Fire, passion, initiative. It's a bowed, by-the-numbers piece of storytelling, like a “Rocky” knockoff done in kimonos and clogs.
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Updated December 22, 2005

Restrained ‘Ringer’ fails to amuse or offend
Having strip-mined the taboos of dwarfism, conjoined twins, albinism, disfigurement and split-personality disorder for laughs, the Farrelly Bros. now turn their high-powered hoses on the Special Olympics. It turns out to be a halfhearted dousing: “The Ringer” is neither as insensitive — or as funny — as one might expect.
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Updated December 22, 2005

Skip this mutilating road trip through the outback
Here's something fun for the holidays: Greg McLean's "Wolf Creek," a pitiless tale of murder and mutilation set in the Australian sticks. Shot with the unflinching spareness of a documentary, it feels a little like a snuff film, and what cozy winter night would be complete without one of those?
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Updated December 22, 2005

'Brokeback Mountain' is a well-made tale of romantic sorrow
Ang Lee's “Brokeback Mountain” has been described in various circles as “the gay cowboy movie,” an alias both glib and faintly humorous. It suggests independent filmmaking at its most precious and contrived: Oil-rig foremen who pour their hearts into haikus, jobless steelworkers who disrobe for money.
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Updated December 15, 2005

Well-acted 'Family Stone' could reduce a rock to tears
“The Family Stone” is weepy holiday gook, but it's weepy holiday gook sprinkled with truffles. The staging couldn't be more blatant, the wishfulness more thick, but somehow it charms its way into our hearts as a snappy, funny/sad meditation on family, love and the inevitability of loss.
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Updated December 15, 2005

Despite strengths, 'Narnia' could use sharper teeth
Though “The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” elegantly preserves the Christian themes of C.S. Lewis' famed fantasy novel, it's unlikely to inspire the religious fan devotion of “Star Wars,” “The Lord of the Rings” or even “The Passion of the Christ.” The movie is perfectly agreeable, adorable even, but hardly revelatory.
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Updated December 8, 2005

'Syriana' puts a slippery, cold spin on the oil business
When we last saw Stephen Gaghan, he was taking home a well-deserved best screenplay Oscar for condensing a months-long British miniseries into the relatively tidy drug saga that was “Traffic” (2000). With “Syriana,” the writer and director has created a similar sort of sprawling, multinarrative civics lesson, this time set in the world of global oil.
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Updated December 8, 2005

Silverman spares no one in 'Jesus Is Magic'
With her astonishingly foul mouth, fearless digressions on sex and race and winsome good looks, comedian Sarah Silverman is like a cross between Richard Pryor and nouveau feminist rocker Liz Phair. She's smart, sexy and unmistakably freakish. No wonder male media types tend to fawn over her like smitten schoolboys.
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Updated December 8, 2005

'First Descent' is like porno for snowboard freaks
Though beautiful to behold, the ski documentaries of filmmaker Warren Miller offer little besides rote visual thrills. In essence, Miller makes ski porno: All spectacle, no plot.
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Updated December 1, 2005

Buff actresses vie to reign as muscle-flexing screen queen
What is it about winning an Oscar that makes Hollywood's best actresses immediately run out and enlist in pulpy, down-market action movies?
Mira Sorvino (“Mighty Aphrodite”) shot blanks in “The Replacement Killers.” Halle Berry (“Monster's Ball”) coughed up a hairball in “Catwoman.” And even the great Judi Dench (“Shakespeare in Love”) couldn't bring respectability to “The Chronicles of Riddick.”
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Updated December 1, 2005

Short on the ‘Rent'
There's a song in Chris Columbus' “Rent” that's so unlistenable, Rosario Dawson's diseased body actually appears to enter remission as the lyrics scatter from a co-star's lips. Certainly, medical science has never seen anything like it: Chemo by love ballad.
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Updated November 24, 2005


‘Ice Harvest’: A Christmas film so wrong, it's somehow right
“The Ice Harvest” is both film noir and a Christmas movie, which makes for an exhilarating sort of paradox — seasonal cheer spiked with defeat, humiliation, rage, lust and self-loathing. Just the kick in the chestnuts the holiday needs, if you ask me.
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Updated November 24, 2005

Music exec confronts his inner fat kid in ‘Just Friends’
Skirt-chasing playboy ninnies have feelings, too. Thus it is deemed in “Just Friends,” a semi-earnest sex comedy done in the Farrelly Bros. style: a bit of raunch, a bit of mawkishness and — it must be said — a modest landfill of silly, low-brow laughs.
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Updated November 24, 2005

Bland blended family celebrated in ‘Yours, Mine and Ours’
“Yours, Mine and Ours” isn't the wholesome misery I expected it to be. Which is to say, it's not as blatantly awful as “Cheaper by the Dozen,” the 2003 Steve Martin comedy about a supersized family from the American heartland who moves to the city.
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Updated November 24, 2005

Stereotypes and preposterous plot mar ‘In the Mix'
‘‘In the Mix’’ is a classic Romeo and Juliet-type story without the deaths, but it’s still tragically bad. With the phenomenal success of Usher’s ‘‘Confessions’’ album, he ought to be poised to make a killing with his latest film project, but fans will be disappointed to find that ‘‘In the Mix’’ is uninteresting, unoriginal and unsexy.
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Updated November 24, 2005

Gere's acting grounds a flawed family in ‘Season'
Richard Gere doesn’t get the credit he deserves as an actor, perhaps because of the way he looks — like somebody plucked him off the set of a Head & Shoulders commercial.
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Updated November 17, 2005

Phoenix, Witherspoon hit every note of Cash's rise, fall and redemption
Richard Gere doesn’t get the credit he deserves as an actor, perhaps because of the way he looks — like somebody plucked him off the set of a Head & Shoulders commercial.
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Updated November 17, 2005

'Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang' is fresh take on ‘buddy' genre
The name...well, the name's not important. Just know that your humble narrator has been sweating this beat since Monica-gate, and he's seen it all: Good movies, bad movies, movies about men who play dodgeball and girls who ride whales. Once, there was even a transsexual rock opera starring a lady with an Adam's apple: “Hedlamp and the ...” something, something.
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Updated November 10, 2005

Latest ‘Pride’ version a worthwhile effort
Even the most zealous Jane Austen fan must admit that “Pride & Prejudice” has enjoyed more than its fair share of attention from filmmakers. In just the past decade, Austen's story has been resurrected as a miniseries, a Mormon-themed romance and a Bollywood musical. Given enough time, it seems probable that some cinematic visionary will blast Mr. Darcy and Co. into outer space.
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Updated November 10, 2005

‘New York Doll' traces glam rocker's journey
In the Mormon Church members are occasionally called upon to give their "testimony," a statement of faith, personal history and gratitude.
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Updated November 3, 2005

Misfiring at non-war, 'Jarhead' never leaves boot camp
Based on Anthony Swofford’s best-selling memoir of the Persian Gulf War, “Jarhead” is the story of a U.S. Marine who goes to the Middle East expecting “Apocalypse Now” and instead finds Albert Camus’ “The Stranger”: Isolation, boredom and scarcity of purpose. Sadly, the audience can relate.
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Updated November 3, 2005

Steve Martin on solid L.A. ground with 'Shopgirl'
In the Steve Martin-scripted lonely-hearts saga “Shopgirl,” the most poetically impersonal job in all of Los Angeles is behind the glove counter at Saks Fifth Avenue. After all, who goes to a glove counter anymore? It's a retail relic, a minimum-wage ivory tower.
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Updated October 27, 2005

Shallow shiksa tale hardly a ‘Prime’ cut
Ben Younger's “Prime” is derived from the sort of tidy, two-sentence premise that always slays ’em at pitch meetings, but frequently — in practice — falls on its own sword.
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Updated October 27, 2005

New ‘Zorro’ is long on sword, short on history
In Hollywood, history is written in dry-erase marker. Consider “The Legend of Zorro,” a fun if lavishly misinformed swashbuckler that reflects both the movie industry's growing awareness of its Spanish-speaking audience, and the attitude that silly trifles such as dates and facts don't amount to a hill of frijoles.
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Updated October 27, 2005

‘Weather Man’ full of upper middle class angst
Director Gore Verbinski is nothing if not versatile. With mostly auspicious results, the one-time TV commercial whiz has dabbled in everything from children's fare (“Mousetrap”) to supernatural horror (“The Ring”) to theme-park-inspired escapism (“Pirates of the Caribbean”).
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Updated October 27, 2005

‘Mirrormask’ cloaked in chaotic storytelling
Artistic genius is more often than not a nontransferable commodity, which is why a Beethoven-caliber talent in one medium is likely to flounder like Ed Wood in the next. Bob Dylan and acting, for instance.
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Updated October 27, 2005

Philip Seymour Hoffman finds the soul of ‘Capote'
Philip Seymour Hoffman is astonishing in “Capote,” not just for the swish, the lisp and the otherwise flawless impersonation of a flaming literary giant, but for the way the performance transcends manner and breathes with tragic, ragged humanity.
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Updated October 27, 2005

Horror, science-fiction come together for film festival in Tempe
The man responsible for the foulest movie ever made — Lloyd Kaufman, whose epochal trash classic “The Toxic Avenger” (1985) continues to offend delicate sensibilities worldwide — will be in Tempe this weekend to help launch the International Horror and Sci-Fi Film Festival, a three-day bonanza of chills, thrills and space-faring transvestites.
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Updated October 20, 2005

Moore stakes old claim, with mixed results, in 'Prize'
In today's competitive movie-star job market, you can't fault Julianne Moore for protecting her beat.
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Updated October 20, 2005

Puzzling 'Stay' suffers from lack of concrete plot
In “Stay,” director Marc Forster (“Monster's Ball”) conjures a striking gallery display of duality, identity and consciousness. If only he had something resembling a concrete plot to occupy his woefully murky main stage.
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Updated October 20, 2005

'Dreamer' trots to an easy, heartwarming win
More wholesome than a petting zoo and every bit as tame, "Dreamer: Inspired by a True Story" is like “Seabiscuit” for the “My Little Pony” crowd. It's a bright and mythic story of broken horses, broken jockeys and broken families, mended one and all by the love of a little girl.
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Updated October 20, 2005

Zombielike writing, acting 'Doom' video-game film
“Doom” is all too fitting a name for this feckless orgy of sci-fi bloodshed — it also describes the fate of any brain cell unlucky enough to stumble between its crosshairs.
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Updated October 20, 2005

‘Good Night' ode to Murrow, journalism of yesteryear
There's a bitingly funny scene in George Clooney's “Good Night, and Good Luck” where Edward R. Murrow — smiter of McCarthyism, paladin of the free press, TV journalist extraordinaire — finds himself tossing celebrity softballs to a zesty young pianist named Liberace.
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Updated October 13, 2005

Cameron Crowe's latest lacks sentiment, feels contrived
In “Elizabethtown,” writer-director Cameron Crowe returns to the sort of filmmaking he does best: Personal stories of youth and triumph, with hard-fought romance set to a snappy adult-alternative soundtrack. So why does this particular Crowe offering feel so desperately whimsical, so lost?
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Updated October 13, 2005

Needless embellishment causes ‘Domino’ to topple
Tony Scott would obviously disagree, but Domino Harvey's life story didn't leave a lot of opportunity for creative embellishment. She was raised in Beverly Hills.
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Updated October 13, 2005

Wallace & Gromit film proves feet of clay hilarious
Britain's most beloved lumps of colored clay make the jump to feature-length animation in “Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit,” and their madcap adventures will quite literally leave you howling with delight.
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Updated October 6, 2005

Startling 'Maxwell Bright' headlines Scottsdale Film Festival
It isn't often that Amy Ettinger, wily film-programming baroness and all-around tough chick, gets spooked by one of her own festival selections. But then, “The Civilization of Maxwell Bright” isn't the sort of movie that comes along very often.
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Updated October 6, 2005

Siblings struggle to find the right fit in ‘In Her Shoes’
One of the telltale symptoms of hack filmmaking is the tendency to over-squeeze scenes — for another laugh, another sniffle, another moment of romantic transcendence — until the squeezing yields not credible human feeling, but the cheap, artificially sweetened Boone's Farm stuff that courses through every bad movie.
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Updated October 6, 2005

Actors can’t cover the spread in tawdry gambling flick
“Two for the Money,” starring Matthew McConaughey and Al Pacino in an epic duel of self-parody, is a familiar if uniquely unsubtle tale of manipulation and greed. It's a lobotomized, sports-themed version of “Wall Street.”
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Updated October 6, 2005

For Paxton, Hollywood may have been the greatest sport ever played
Bill Paxton's long, strange journey to Hollywood respectability (the man played Chet in “Weird Science,” lest we forget) hasn't exactly taken the edge off his feisty Texan attitude. Sequestered deep in the labyrinthine bowels of the Arizona Biltmore Resort & Spa in Phoenix, Paxton is sounding a bit more like a fight promoter than a film director.
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Updated September 29, 2005

‘Greatest Game’ limps lamely down the back nine
The 1913 U.S. Open final between British champion Harry Vardon and American upstart Francis Ouimet might well have been “The Greatest Game Ever Played,” but don't get unduly aroused by the grandiose title: It was still golf.
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Updated September 29, 2005

Few new or edifying twists in Polanski's 'Oliver'
One of my most indelible movie memories from childhood was watching little Mark Lester pathetically mew for another bowl of gruel in Carol Reed's 1968 musical masterpiece “Oliver,” and I imagine I'm not alone.
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Updated September 29, 2005

Even the Holocaust rings hollow in ‘Illuminated’
In attempting to turn Jonathan Safran Foer's semi-autobiographical novel “Everything Is Illuminated” into coherent cinema, Liev Schreiber has done, if not the impossible, then the highly improbable: Reduced the Holocaust to a mere happening — an emotionless vessel of quirky musings and fashionably digressive storytelling.
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Updated September 29, 2005

Film puts violence under the microscope
In the alarmingly wholesome opening moments of David Cronenberg's “A History of Violence,” we find gentle, peace-loving family man Tom Stall (Viggo Mortensen) comforting his little girl after a bad dream.
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Updated September 29, 2005

‘Proof' gives no division between sanity, madness
Sanity is such a vague, slippery concept that anyone who tries to grip it with both hands is liable to go bughouse themselves. So it goes in John Madden's “Proof,” an elegant, engrossing puzzle of motivations and sympathies that keeps you guessing until the final piece slides into place.
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Updated September 22, 2005

‘Flightplan’ takes a direct route to empty emotion
In “Flightplan,” Jodie Foster plays a real mother of a mother who will stop at nothing to save her little girl.
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Updated September 22, 2005

'Flightplan' doesn't push Foster's envelope
Jodie Foster has managed her career just fine up to this point — the bookend Oscars, the box-office cred, the universal acclaim of her audience and peers — so is it completely off-base to suggest that maybe, just maybe, she's getting a little complacent?
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Updated September 22, 2005

Other director Lee rolls into the ’70s
One must wonder what Spike Lee makes of Malcolm D. Lee, his less famous and eminently less controversial cousin. In terms of artistic temperament, the two filmmakers offer stark contrasts. Malcolm's movies (“Undercover Brother,” “The Best Man”) are unburdened and beatific, less serious than a hiccup. Spike's movies are hardly that.
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Updated September 22, 2005

Hollow characters mark empty ‘Junebug'
With its odd shapes, elliptical characters and languorous pulse of Southern self-hatred, “Junebug” is the sort of overreaching novelty that seems too determined to call attention to itself as a bona fide counterculture art film. To say the least, it makes for an unbecoming display, like a nouveau riche hillbilly flaunting the bling in an Olive Garden.
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Updated September 22, 2005

Locked and Loaded
When we first meet Yuri Orlov, the rumpled Faustian centerpiece of Andrew Niccol's teasingly bleak gunrunner saga “Lord of War,” he's standing ankle-deep in a sea of spent bullet casings, calmly stating his wish to arm every man, woman and child on the planet.
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Updated September 15, 2005

Romantic afterlife comedy is sweetly contrived
If not quite divine, “Just Like Heaven” is a perfectly agreeable helping of romantic fairy-tale goo, a whimsical supernatural comedy borne on magic kisses, serendipitous gusts of wind and winning chemistry. Rarely will you find two co-stars so effortlessly appealing.
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Updated September 15, 2005

Short film festival gives audience members a vote
"It's phenomenal" are the first words out of Nicholas Mason's mouth when asked about the Manhattan Short Film Festival.
Of course, he may be a little biased. Mason is the creator of the touring festival, which has spread across the country and is coming to the East Valley this weekend.
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Updated September 15, 2005

Unfinished Life has lodding plotline
Lasse Hallstrom's “An Unfinished Life” is a lavishly cast, somewhat meandering tale of buried pain and unresolved grief. More interestingly, it offers strong evidence that Robert Redford wants to be Clint Eastwood when he grows up.
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Updated September 8, 2005

Clichés line the road to and from 'Beautiful Country'
Binh (Damien Nguyen) is like any other awkward American teenager, circa 1990 — gangly, withdrawn, listens to New Wave, always bumping into things — with one notable exception: He's never stepped foot in America.
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Updated September 8, 2005

Cultivating the ideal role for Weisz
Rachel Weisz was in Los Angeles, shooting the supernatural thriller “Constantine” with Keanu Reeves. The mostly middle-of-the-night shooting schedule was exhausting, and time off was rare. When she finally did get a day to rest, she packed an overnight bag and flew to London.
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Updated September 1, 2005

‘Underclassman’ aims at high school, hits kindergarten
One Chris Tucker per lifetime is plenty, so what's the point of having a Nick Cannon? In “Underclassman,” Cannon (“Drumline”) talks like Tucker, brays like Tucker and gets in yo face like Tucker — if obnoxious movie-star personas were protected by federal copyright laws, the “Friday” comedian would have an open-and-shut case.
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Updated September 1, 2005

'Brothers Grimm' is more tangled than Teutonic Woods
Sadly, Terry Gilliam's uncompromising, studio-aversive genius comes with a price: His films, produced independently, are often sustained by crude investment coalitions that are as fractious and collapse-prone as an Italian democracy.
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Updated August 25, 2005

'Brothers Grimm' is more tangled than Teutonic Woods
S Anyone who's suffered through an episode of “Full House” or — ick — “America's Funniest Home Videos” will enjoy a diabolical gust of satisfaction when squeaky-clean TV dad Bob Saget tells the world's dirtiest joke in “The Aristocrats.” It's a little like watching a televangelist confess to adultery and embezzlement. Good, good stuff.
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Updated August 25, 2005

Carell hilarious in 'The 40-Year-Old Virgin
Steve Carell is so convincing as the no-action-getting title character of Judd Apatow's bawdy masterpiece “The 40-Year-Old Virgin,” one suspects that his performance is at least partly autobiographical.
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Updated August 18, 2005

'Four Brothers' fails to produce any real emotion
John Singleton, we hardly knew ye. Long gone is the 23-year-old upstart who bravely challenged our collective thirst for righteous, revenge-motivated bloodshed with his brilliant debut feature, “Boyz N the Hood” (1991).
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Updated August 11, 2005

Ensemble drama takes shots at cynicism
Don Roos’ “Happy Endings” rattles dangerously with themes of gay parenthood, abortion, gold-digging and erotic massage, but the display is for show only.
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Updated August 11, 2005

‘Great Raid' fails to liberate its full potential
John Dahl’s “The Great Raid” is a suspenseful, sepia-toned account of the U.S. Army’s audacious scheme to liberate 500 POWs from a brutal Japanese prison camp in the Philippines during World War II.
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Updated August 11, 2005

‘Skeleton Key’ opens door to mediocre movie
In “The Skeleton Key,” Kate Hudson (“Almost Famous”) plays a hospice nurse who does what frightened white people in movies usually do when they find out they're living in a haunted house: She stays.
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Updated August 11, 2005