Twin Dragons (Shuang long hui)

Twin Dragons (Shuang long hui)

Twin Dragons, starring Jackie Chan and directed by Tsui Hark and Ringo Lam is a huge disappointment. Regular readers will know that I am a Chan fan, but although it was made some years ago in Hong Kong, this movie looks like one made to suit a big star who has too much creative control…

Matrix, The

Matrix, The

When the winner of the Big Game lottery jackpot of $197 million didn’t immediately come forward to claim his prize recently, newspapers were reduced to running an AP photo of the shop in Boston where the winning ticket was sold. In the photo a young man is shown from behind as he affixes a sign…

Go

Go

The good news about Go, written by John August and directed by Douglas Liman (Swingers) is that it is the best of the scores of imitations of Quentin Tarantino that have appeared since Pulp Fiction set the standard for hip postmodernism at the movies in 1994. It is therefore the hippest movie you can see…

Cookie’s Fortune

Cookie’s Fortune

Robert Altman’s new picture, Cookie’s Fortune, is like all his films in having in it a lot of good things pushed to—and usually way beyond—their limit. Here the relentless folksiness of the sleepy Mississippi town, Holly Springs, is truly charming most of the time, but on occasion it becomes almost enough to give Andy Griffith…

Idle Hands

Idle Hands

Idle Hands, directed by Rodman Flender (can there really be someone with such a name?), is another in the recent spate of teen movies. With what can only be considered predictable unsuccess, it tries to marry the old-fashioned, rather campy moralism of the old-time teen slasher movie with the hip, happenin’, po-mo wit of Scream….

SLC Punk

SLC Punk

SLC Punk is another teen movie, but one with a serious purpose that is not lost sight of in the first five minutes. Obviously based on the personal experience of the writer-director James Merendino, it presents us with the inherently comic picture of a post-high school punk rocker, called Stevo (Matthew Lillard), and the not…

Open Your Eyes (Abre Los Ojos)

Open Your Eyes (Abre Los Ojos)

There is an essential bit of information about the plot of Open Your Eyes (in Spanish Abre Los Ojos), directed by Alejandro Amenábar, which is withheld until almost the end of the film and which, because I think it just about worth seeing, I will not reveal here. But it is worth knowing that it…

Abre Los Ojos (Open Your Eyes)

Abre Los Ojos (Open Your Eyes)

There is an essential bit of information about the plot of Open Your Eyes (in Spanish Abre Los Ojos), directed by Alejandro Amenábar, which is withheld until almost the end of the film and which, because I think it just about worth seeing, I will not reveal here. But it is worth knowing that it…

Among Giants

Among Giants

You sure can tell that Among Giants was written by Simon Beaufoy (it was directed by Sam Miller), last heard from as the screenwriter of The Full Monty. Like Monty, this movie is set in (or near) Sheffield in Yorkshire and is an exercise in nostalgia and sentimentality of a peculiarly English—especially a northern English—type….