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'The Express' not as memorable as Davis
10/10/2008 | REVIEW | Ernie Davis was the first African-American to win football's Heisman Trophy. The passage of time and the brevity of his career and life have made him a forgotten figure, something the workmanlike football drama "The Express" aims to change.
Cheapening the experience
10/10/2008 | COLUMN | The announcement ran something like this:" 'The Express' 7 p. m. with 'Burn After Reading. ' "So far so good. I knew what I was going to be doing on Saturday night.
The most worthwhile in the genre
10/10/2008 | REVIEW | Several movies have tackled the war on terror, but nobody has wanted to see any of them, either because the topic is too daunting or too much of a downer, or it's simply still too soon after 9/11.
'Blindness' lacks vision
10/3/2008 | REVIEW | A driver suddenly stops at an intersection, unable to see. A prostitute loses her sight and is abandoned, naked, by her client. One by one, a cosmopolitan city is filled with sightless doctors, thieves, secretaries, children all stumbling about, groping aimlessly toward they know not what.
Nick, Norah and near-perfect love
10/3/2008 | REVIEW | "Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist" is one of those magical, near-perfect youth romances, a film that so vividly reminds you of the glories of young love that you wish you were 18 again, full of hope, not jaded by life and love lost.
The price of overkill
9/26/2008 | REVIEW | Far-fetched, fast-moving, locked and overloaded, "Eagle Eye" is what happens when you give the people who made a success of the modestly budgeted "Disturbia" a blank check.
Lee's ambition backfires
9/26/2008 | REVIEW | In Spike Lee's long and eclectic career, "Miracle at St. Anna" is easily his most technically ambitious film. But he might not have been ready for the enormity of such a project.
Lane, Gere pull off comforting love story
9/26/2008 | REVIEW | "Nights in Rodanthe" is another one of those bare-bones tests: a love story, two characters and a fairly simple, mostly single setting. It's familiar territory, which makes it comforting but runs the risk of clichι.
Some fall films should be taken seriously
9/26/2008 | COLUMN | Fall, we so often are told, is the time for serious film. Not necessarily in terms of awards, though. Hollywood tends to save those kinds of films for December, figuring that Oscar voters will forget anything released earlier in the year.
A comedy that comes alive
9/19/2008 | REVIEW | "Ghost Town" serves as a very nice vehicle for the comedy stylings of Ricky Gervais, the Brit originator of "The Office" and showbiz-savvy (not really) star of "Extras."
A neighborhood war; an animated bore
9/19/2008 | REVIEW | Aside from sapphire swimming pools, there is no water in sight of Lakeview Terrace, a tidy cul-de-sac development in suburban L. A. Instead, just beyond the drop-off, there are canyons of tinder-dry scrub and distant, growing wildfires.
'Speed Racer' a winner in race of colors, contrast and details
9/19/2008 | DVD | "The Love Guru"When a movie actor, particularly a comedian, makes a film as bad as "The Love Guru," it causes you to look back at his other work with a more critical eye.
Evolution of LaBute
9/19/2008 | COLUMN | When Hollywood comes calling, offering interviews with filmmakers, you seldom say no even when you know the interviewees are interested mostly in hyping their own work.
To the other extreme
9/12/2008 | REVIEW | They have made violent thrillers, screwball farces, classic remakes and literary adaptations, but look at nearly 25 years of Coen brothers' movies and you see essentially two types. There are bloody dramas that pause for offbeat comedy. And there are offbeat comedies that are interrupted by bloody drama. And all that changes is the proportion of laughs to violence.
All the boutiques, none of the bite
9/12/2008 | REVIEW | With her remake of George Cukor's 1939 cat fight "The Women," based on the play by Clare Booth Luce, Diane English has applied all the lighthearted instincts of her sitcom background and seemingly none of the insights of the source material.
McConaughey's torso carries watery surf flick
9/12/2008 | REVIEW | In "Surfer, Dude," Matthew McConaughey plays a shy, brooding physicist whose revolutionary work in the field of quantum mechanics earns him a Nobel Prize. Just kidding, brah!
The Dude returns in Coen brothers' cult favorite
9/12/2008 | DVD | "Cool Hand Luke"1/2Paul Newman has been around so long that he's become one of those grand old men of American film. But back in 1967, when this Stuart Rosenberg film hit the screen, he was still a vital presence and not above starring in a smallish film just to play an intriguing character.
Top tales of survival
9/12/2008 | COLUMN | One of my favorite film genres is the post-apocalypse thriller. You know the kind of film I mean. It's where something horrible happens a plague, maybe, or nuclear war and then we follow a group of characters as the world struggles to survive.
'Rape of Europa' tells World War II art story
9/5/2008 | REVIEW | When people think about World War II, wondering what it meant for the fate of museum-quality art is probably not the first thing that comes to mind.
Indie horror tale offers a mixed bag
9/5/2008 | REVIEW | "Baghead" is the best of the shaky-cam spawn of "The Blair Witch Project. "Yes, it's another how-low-can-you-go budget indie horror movie about making an indie horror movie.
Josh Hamilton goes distance in 'Outsourced'
9/5/2008 | Josh Hamilton loves to travel. His travel obsession is one reason why the New York-based actor jumped at the chance to star in "Outsourced," John Jeffcoat's little film that opened the 2008 Spokane International Film Festival.
HBO series riveting, dramatic, even therapeutic
9/5/2008 | "Outsourced"Culture clash is one of the age-old ways that filmmakers use to create cinematic tension. And nowhere is that kind of clash more prevalent than in India, especially when the country is encountered by an American naοf.
Dealing with a true villian
8/29/2008 | REVIEW | "Traitor" is a solid, gripping, only occasionally preachy thriller built around the War on Terror. Ripped-from-the- headlines realism, top-drawer performances by Don Cheadle and Guy Pearce, a dandy "ticking clock" story structure and a vast catalog of terrorist modus operandi make this as harrowing as it is timely.
Only special effects are out of this world
8/29/2008 | REVIEW | The makers of "Fly Me to the Moon" a 3D cartoon about flies that sneak onto the Apollo 11 spaceship apparently hope to do for the common household pests what "Ratatouille," "Flushed Away," "Antz" and "A Bug's Life" did for rats and ants.
Can Rainn Wilson shake the Schrute shackles?
8/22/2008 | REVIEW | Despite its title, "The Rocker" isn't about music. It's about "the scene," the part of rock 'n' roll more concerned with groupies and beer bongs than power chords and thumping bass lines.
