Pursuit of Happyness, The

A couple of months ago I picked Stigmata the front-runner in the Worst-Movie-of-the Year Stakes, but Kevin Smith’s disastrously awful Dogma has now blown by it in the stretch and is cantering towards the finish several lengths ahead of the field. Since his promising debut with Clerks (1994), Smith has been going steadily downhill in…

The ultimate in Civil War re-enactments is, alas, much less successful as a movie.

Smilla’s Sense of Snow, based on the novel by Peter Hoeg and directed by Bille August from a screenplay by Ann Biderman, is another film in which far too much is going on. At its most basic, it is about the search by the beautiful young Smilla (Julia Ormond) for the murderer of a six…

The idea of a ghost who comes back from the dead to haunt his murderer is probably as old as murder itself and is familiar to us from the famous scene in Macbeth where Banquo’s ghost appears at the feast. But the idea of a ghost who appears not as a decorous classical shade, a…

Did you think you would never see a movie that was worse than Kill Bill? Prepare to be amazed, for its pop culture auteur has outdone himself.

In the first paragraph of his review, of Peter and Bobby Farrelly’s movie, There’s Something about Mary, Stephen Hunter of the Washington Post suggests that the picture is not only brilliantly funny but also one in the eye of those carping critics (presumably those with “artistic” pretensions) who don’t believe that “it is enough for…