In this offering from the fecund imagination of Oliver Stone there is no hyperbole, no bombast, and no vast paranoid conspiracy. Instead, with World Trade Center, he has turned his considerable gifts, and using actual events, to recreate what it was like to be at Ground Zero, literally and figuratively, on the day that everything… Read More »
QUINCEANERA
The QUINCEANERA is a coming-of-age celebration for Mexican girls in which they take the step from childhood to adulthood, a step from which there is no turning back. As observed today, there is painstaking attention to the rituals, but the underlying meaning as often as not, gets lost in the materialism of expensive clothes and… Read More »
STEP UP
STEP UP is a surprisingly wholesome bit of fluff with an amiably charismatic cast and a script that should be cited for violating the basic tenets of solid scriptwriting. Uneven, undecided, and rife with everything except aliens from space and a natural disaster, it’s further hobbled by cliches, bouts of stale dialogue, inadvisable turns into… Read More »
CONVERSATIONS WITH OTHER WOMEN
A chance meeting between two strangers (Helena Bonham Carter, pretty in pink, and Aaron Eckhart, suave in a tux) at a wedding reception in New York City starts the action in CONVERSATIONS WITH OTHER WOMEN, a slippery delight with as much tension as a standard thriller, but the smarts of a literate drama, both of which… Read More »
THE ILLUSIONIST
Click here to listen to the interview with Neil Burger (15:34). A man in shirtsleeves sitting in intense concentration on a bare stage. The audience watching in rapt silence. Police lining the aisles ready to act. Thus begins THE ILLUSIONIST, a tale of sleight-of-hand, misdirection, and magic in many senses of the word. The only… Read More »
IDLEWILD
IDELWILD starts with a bang, splashing across the screen with a raucous exuberance full of sass, attitude, and an irreverent visual sense that enhances the edginess to the life the protagonists have chosen. If it weren’t for a love story that plops itself in the middle of it, this would have been a classic. As… Read More »
HOLLYWOODLAND
HOLLYWOODLAND deals with the death of George Reeves, television’s Superman and the idol of millions of kids who were devastated by not just his passing, but that it was reported to have been suicide. It was during a party at his house, when he went upstairs and was later found with a bullet through his… Read More »
GRIDIRON GANG
Before seeing GRIDIRON GANG, I would have said that given the right sort of role, one with action, a greater or lesser dash of comedy, and no stretching of a thespian nature, that Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson is a fine screen presence but not much more. I have been proved wrong. There’s humor and a… Read More »
THE BLACK DAHLIA
There are so many missteps in Brian De Palma’s THE BLACK DAHLIA that one hardly knows where to start. Perhaps the best place is with the adaptation of James Ellroy’s novel of the same name. The book is a rich and vibrant work that provides too much fodder for a two-hour film to capture. Instead… Read More »
JESUS CAMP
The compassionate god of love so evident in the Sermon on the Mount is nowhere to be found in the documentary JESUS CAMP. It’s a frank, troubling, and cautionary examination of how fundamentalist Christianity closes the minds of its children while indoctrinating them in a belief system of intolerance, bigotry, and hate, all in the name… Read More »
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