Archive for September, 2006

Ten-year-old Arthur, in a bid to save his grandfathers house from being demolished, goes looking for some much-fabled hidden treasure in the land of the Minimoys, a tiny people living in harmony with nature.

Stephen Frears's sublimely nimble evisceration of the British royal family pries open a window in the House of Windsor around the time of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales.

IPans LabyrinthI is not your average fairy tale. WriterDirectorMexican Visionary Guillermo del Toro IDevils BackboneI, IHellboyI has crafted a wicked blend of visual extravagance, gruesome horror, and surreal fantasy. In combining these elements, he has made one of the most gut-wrenching films ever to star an unsuspecting 11-year-old girl. That is what some people, if not me, will truly love about IPans LabyrinthIits a brutal karate chop to the head.

Like rehearsal dinner champagne that has lost its fizz, theres nothing in the storyline to keep the humor fresh, and as a result a lot of the laughs fall flat. A good example is the naturist couple storyline. The image of naked people riding a tandem bicycle is a sort of funny visual gag, but the bit gets old pretty quick. Naked people playing badminton; naked people having a barbecue; upset people getting naked out of protest in the middle of a meeting; Isitt pounds her audience with nudity humor like a kid playing Whack-A-Mole in the arcade.

If it wasn’t true before, it’s certainly true with the appearance of “The Latin Legends of Comedy”: the word legend has been devalued to the point of worthlessness.

Boring people who made extraordinary music, the Pixies are inexplicable. In attempting to demystify them, this backstage pass to their 2004 reunion tour achieves the opposite.

Boy meets boy like you’ve never seen in Julián Hernández’s sex-drenched, extravagantly minimalist epic.

Billy Bob Thornton's estimable talents are squandered in this shoddy comedy directed by Todd Phillips ("Old School").

Periodic bursts of cleverness and eye-popping imagery can’t disguise that this is just another movie full of jive-talking computer-generated animals with little new to say.

Although four stories are folded together in Eric Khoo’s elliptical film, it's the true story of a deaf and blind Singaporean woman that gives the movie its backbone.