It’s 2 a.m. and you awake with a jerk, alone in your fully lit apartment and still on the couch. On TV, the credits of some movie you’ve already seen a billion times are scrolling by. It feels like rock bottom. And we know, because we’re just like you: single.
Need a movie to keep Read More
After her superbly understated performance as Harper Lee in the undervalued film Infamous, I developed a whole new respect for Sandra Bullock. She should have been honored with an Academy Award nomination, along with the unforgettably brilliant Toby Jones, who was light years ahead of Philip Seymour Hoffman in the role of Truman Capote. (They Read More
They gave the Oscar to the wrong Truman Capote. I do not begrudge the versatile, popular Philip Seymour Hoffman his Oscar for playing the tiny terror in Capote, but he was doing an impression. In Infamous, the second movie about the tortures that the literary sensation endured while writing his masterpiece, In Cold Blood, a Read More
They gave the Oscar to the wrong Truman Capote. I do not begrudge the versatile, popular Philip Seymour Hoffman his Oscar for playing the tiny terror in Capote, but he was doing an impression. In Infamous, the second movie about the tortures that the literary sensation endured while writing his masterpiece, In Cold Blood, a Read More
Alejandro Agresti’s The Lake House, from a screenplay by David Auburn, is based on a Korean film, Il Mare, which I have not seen and cannot really imagine. This is to say that The Lake House is longer on a kind of furtive charm than on narrative logic. How, people are asking in and out Read More
Either I’m getting soft in the heart or I’m getting long in the tooth. Probably both. Anyway, I’m getting used to Keanu Reeves. He can’t act, but his blank-blackboard expressions and his narcoleptic demeanor while mumbling lines in his sleep have become as so-what routine as Madonna’s push-ahead self-promotion. And speaking of routine, his shared Read More
Either I’m getting soft in the heart or I’m getting long in the tooth. Probably both. Anyway, I’m getting used to Keanu Reeves. He can’t act, but his blank-blackboard expressions and his narcoleptic demeanor while mumbling lines in his sleep have become as so-what routine as Madonna’s push-ahead self-promotion. And speaking of routine, his shared Read More
If it’s true that man only uses 10 percent of his brain capacity at any given time, somebody got short-changed on a pile of swill called Guess Who. This cheesy, brain-dead remake of Stanley Kramer’s 1967 milestone Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner reverses the races, with the spastic Ashton Kutcher in the Sidney Poitier role Read More
Anne-Sophie Birot’s Girls Can’t Swim , from a screenplay by Ms. Birot and Christophe Honoré, breaks some new ground in the currently fashionable rite-of-passage genre for adolescent girls, corresponding to Hollywood’s rite-of-passage genre for adolescent boys (culminating, I suppose in the extraordinarily popular Spider-Man , the über –Andy Hardy of the new millennium-and like its Read More
An Appointment With the Big Guy
For his first film since his Oscar-winning performance in American Beauty , Kevin Spacey has chosen The Big Kahuna , an odd, independently produced little vehicle filmed in 16 days on the kind of low budget that wouldn’t cover the bottled water on most Hollywood film sets. The Read More
