Black Hawk Down (2001)

The fairy-tale implications of title of The Princess and the Warrior (or, with German logic, Der Krieger und die Kaiserin), written and directed by Tom Tykwer, is both misleading and not. The film is set in the present day, in Wuppertal, Germany, and is told realistically—without even the fractured time scheme of Tykwer’s earlier hit,…

Despite having almost nothing to do with the novel by Alexandre Dumas from which it is supposedly adapted, The Man in the Iron Mask by Randall Wallace is not so bad as one might have expected it to be. Certainly it is a lot better than the ineffably silly Three Musketeers of a few years…

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.

Waiting for Guffman is the cheapest of cheap comedy. All it takes is our suspension of disbelief (easy in New York and L.A.) that the rubes in fly-over country could be as witless and unhip as they are presented as being here. Hip is our new class marker: snobbery on the basis of race or…

Drop Dead Gorgeous, directed by Michael Patrick Jann, is intermittently quite funny, but ultimately doesn’t work because it is offensively patronizing to the people of small-town Minnesota whom it sees through the eyes of New York or Los Angeles—or some even more fabulously sophisticated place. In this view of the American heartland, the people are…

Rachel Boynton tells a good story — at least for political junkies — but tries to make it mean something it doesn’t