Archive for April, 2007

The fascinating documentary “Alice Neel” illuminates history while also demonstrating how an artist’s style reveals his or her personality.

The meek, mopey comedy “In the Land of Women” is the film equivalent of a sensitive emo band with one foot in alternative rock and the other in the squishy pop mainstream.

Starring: Shia LaBeouf, David Morse, Sarah Roemer, Carrie-Anne Moss Review: No sense kicking this thriller for plot holes and lapses in logic when the action, suspense and flirty sex come at such a lively clip. Shia LaBeouf, a gifted young actor still in search of that breakthrough role, is a winning combo of smart and smartass as Kale, a suburban teen under house arrest for having clocked his Spanish teacher. The dude was way too condescending about the trauma Kale suffered a year ago when his dad died. Housebound Kale is bristling from the first day of his three-month confinement. In Hitchcock's Rear Window, a broken leg kept Jimmy Stewart's character at home in New York, staring at his neighbors through a telescope. Disturbia is not in the same league as that 1954 classic. But co-writer Carl Ellsworth, who scripted the nifty jet-bound thriller Red... Rating: 3 Stars

Starring: Richard Gere, Alfred Molina, Marcia Gay Harden, Hope Davis, Julie... Review: Richard Gere, nearly unrecognizable with blackened hair and a fake nose, gives one of his very best performances as Clifford Irving, the huckster who won a million-dollar advance from McGraw-Hill in 1971 for writing an authorized biography of the notoriously reclusive tycoon Howard Hughes. The catch? Irving never met Hughes, a fact that only became known when the gazillionaire, played by Leonardo DiCaprio in The Aviator, gave a telephone news conference to announce the hoax. Irving, who served two years for fraud, has faded from public view. But scams, pulled in the name of weapons of mass destruction or the paternity of Anna Nicole?s baby, are the lingua franca of the new century. Swedish director Lasse Hallstrom has a knack for American stories, including What's Eating Gilbert... Rating: 3 Stars

Starring: Larry Blackmon, C. Martin Croker, Matt Maiellaro, Carey Means, An... Review: For those who are shit-ignorant of the late-night Adult Swim programming block on the Cartoon Network, this film of the Aqua Teen Hunger Force series may strike you as balls-out strange, since it involves neither teens nor water. Even us fans know you could bottle this animated series about foulmouthed fast-food products from New Jersey and call it instant stupid. No way do the show?s writers, directors and voice actors Matt Maiellaro and Dave Willis fill eighty-seven minutes of screen time with nonstop laughs. And to call the animation crude would be high praise. But they succeed enough of the time to make a perversely entertaining movie. ATHF is better in small doses, but it whups the ass of the maddeningly successful TMNT as multiplex mischief. With sassy Master Shake (voiced by Dana... Rating: 2 Stars

Starring: Halle Berry, Bruce Willis, Giovanni Ribisi, Gary Dourdan, Krista ... Review: I need to begin with a shout out to James Foley for having directed three terrific movies: 1987's At Close Range, 1990's After Dark, My Sweet and1992's Glengarry Glen Ross, still the best screen version ever of a David Mamet play. Now for the bad news. Foley fights a losing battle with Perfect Stranger, a dull, dumb and unforgivably dated thriller, free of thrills and any kind of perfection, save a genius for product placement. Halle Berry and Bruce Willis, forced to compete with blatant plugs for Reebok, Heineken and Victoria's Secret, understandably give up all attempts at acting. Foley merely poses them like spears of prize broccoli. Berry plays a reporter trying to pin a murder on a married ad exec. You guessed it, Willis play the rich horndog with a jealous wife and a jones for... Rating: 1 Stars

Starring: David Duchovny, Ioan Gruffudd, Sigourney Weaver, Judy Greer, Just... Review: Television is an easy target. All you have to do is channel surf for five minutes any day of the week to nail the medium for its unabashed stupidity and venality. Most movies on the topic, recently "American Dreamz", screw up by pushing too hard. Jake Kasdan (son of Lawrence), the writer and director of The TV Set, wisely avoids that trap. He knows the drill too well having worked with Judd Apatow on "Freaks and Geeks" and "Undeclared", two sitcoms that show how often smart equals quick cancellation on the tube. In his third feature (after Zero Effect and Orange County), Kasdan traces the birth pangs of a sitcom called "The Wexler Chronicles" which the show's writer Mike Klein (a pricelessly deadpan David Duchovny) fashioned around the suicide of his brother. Naturally, the network... Rating: 3 Stars

Starring: John Travolta, James Gandolfini, Salma Hayek, Jared Leto, Laura D... Review: In a memorably disturbing 1970 film called The Honeymoon Killers director Leonard Kastle, replacing a fired Martin Scorsese, told the true-crime story of Raymond Fernandez (Tony LoBianco) who teamed up during the 1940s with the overweight and overwrought Martha Beck (the superb Shirley Stoler) to con and then kill rich, lonely widows. Raymond was the sex bait while the jealous Martha would pass herself off as his sister, a nurse. The film spawned a cult and a 1996 Mexican remake, Deep Crimson. So, you might ask, why do it again? Director-screenwriter Todd Robinson has a good reason. Long Island Detective Elmer C. Robinson who helped capture these honeymoon killers and witnessed their execution in 1951, was Robinson's grandfather. Todd grew up hearing stories about the grisly case. By... Rating: 2 Stars

Between Midnight and 5 a.m., Ray Liotta will have the most confusing five hours of his life. Hes a district attorney who just found out that his assistant D.A. who also happens to be his secret lover has killed a man who was trying to rape her. Or was he? A mysterious smooth talker LL Cool J shakes Liottas confidence with a tale of his assistant D.A.s involvement with a notorious gangster Liotta has been chasing for years. From there were with Liotta every step of the way, as he runs from interrogation room to interrogation room saying, Whats going on?

“Grindhouse” is soaked in bloody nostalgia for the cheesy, disreputable pleasures of an older form of movie entertainment.