There are a lot of things wrong with Howard Deutch’s new film, The Replacements, beginning with the fact that it is a football movie and therefore, in my view, extremely limited in its scope for originality. But it is just about worth seeing. There are some good jokes — I especially liked the one where…
Wonderland by Michael Winterbottom is the second British film this year to adapt to London the ambitious American treatment of Los Angeles by Robert Altman in Short Cuts or the San Fernando Valley by Paul Thomas Anderson in Magnolia. The other was Beautiful People by Jasmin Dizdar which, though not a bad film, lost its…
A great fan of Taste of Cherry, the last film by the Iranian director, Abbas Kiarostami, I went to his newest, The Wind Will Carry Us with high hopes. I was not disappointed. It is an even better, more engaging and interesting, work than the other, but is recognizably by the same man. In particular,…
The re-release of Jules Dassin’s Rififi (French title: Du Rififi Chez les Hommes) of 1954 comes opportunely to remind the Hollywood epigoni known to these pages as the Taranteenies of what film noir really was. The chief difference between it and that which too often, and too erroneously, goes under the same name today, is…
The wildly over-rated Dancer in the Dark by Lars von Trier (Breaking the Waves) seems to me simply the most silly and pretentious load of tripe that I have seen in many a long day. So silly is it that, but for remembering a similar but less obtrusive kind of silliness to be found in…
The Eyes of Tammy Faye, a documentary by Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato, is worth seeing in the limited sense in which many inferior documentaries are worth seeing—that is, as a document of cultural or sociological interest. I confess to a further enjoyment of the campy set-up—including narration by RuPaul Charles and little Shari Lewis-style…
Nurse Betty, the new film by Neil LaBute (In the Company of Men, Your Friends and Neighbors), is wonderfully enjoyable all the way through until its last ten minutes when suddenly the wild and thrilling ride it has offered us comes to a dead end. The story concerns Betty (Renée Zellweger), a small-town waitress from…
It’s almost unbelievable that at this distance of time someone could make a movie about Abbie Hoffman which is utterly without any sense of irony about or detachment from the eccentric views of the late Yippie leader. They used to say about the Bourbons that they had learned nothing and forgotten nothing, but Louis XVIII…
Alice et Martin, directed and co-written by André Techiné, is an unconventional romance of a type that the French are so good at, but it is also a complex psychological drama which, I think, loses itself in its own complexities. At the level of the cinematic or dramatic detail it is a fine film. The…
Saving Grace, written by Craig Ferguson and Mark Crowdy and directed by Nigel Cole, I found a surprisingly charming and thoroughly entertaining film until about three quarters of the way through, when it lapsed into a tired druggy fantasy that made the rest of the thing look bad retrospectively. I think the key to making…
Gross-out comedies are now as much a tradition of the summer movie season as the special-effects blockbusters — and sometimes the two are hard to tell one from another. Scary Movie, which shot to the top of the list of box office grosses (if you’ll pardon the expression) in the week after it opened, purports…
The title of the latest movie to come out of the Evil Empire is Disney’s “The Kid”, possibly because the filmmakers were afraid that people might confuse it with the Charlie Chaplin classic of 1921—though more likely because Disney’s appalling hubris just can’t bear not to have its loathsome name on everything it produces. The…
