Okay, I'll start by admitting that I blew the call about Best Picture. So the rumors of Crash's ascension were not overstated. (I saw Carrie Rickey of The Philadelphia Inquirer on Friday morning, and she voiced a suspicion that Crash might win. ...
It wasn't long ago that the concept of a "sequel" was a rarity. By that I mean the exception rather than the rule. There were a few each year - the lastest James Bond, the next Star Trek, another Rocky or Friday the 13th. But you could count on one...
Film festivals generate two types of fatigue. The first is the kind everyone is familiar with: not enough sleep. For me, a typical day at the Toronto Film Festival begins with the alarm going off at 7:00 am (or earlier) and doesn't end until about ...
Making these predictions has become as annual a ritual as watching the Oscars. I do both with limited enthusiasm. Some people can't understand how I, a film critic, can dislike the Academy Awards. The reason is simple: they bore me. It's not an ...
I knew when I wrote the review for An Inconvenient Truth that there would be rough waves ahead. I don't enjoy reviewing movies with a political slant because of the volume of negative e-mail those reviews generate. (Actually, it's not the negativity ...
There's a common misconception about film critics - that all we enjoy are stuffy, pretentious films that drag on interminably and are as lively as a stone gargoyle. While that probably describes some of the more esoteric and high-minded critics, it'...
It's well documented that I don't give out four star reviews easily. In fact, over the past 28 months, I have accorded this rating to only three movies: Maria Full of Grace, Munich, and United 93. My stinginess can be attributed to two things: an ...
It has been said that even bad press is good publicity, and there's a certain amount of truth to that. There's certainly no lack of press (good and bad) surrouding the release of The Da Vinci Code, which opens on Friday. It's a curious thing to ...
A long time in coming? Indeed.When I posted the first two installments of my fantasy trilogy last year, they were in a mostly finished form, having been written and edited in the early 1990s. The third book, The Price of Terror, was incomplete at ...
As I get older, I get crankier. I wonder what I'll be like if I live to be 70. Not that long ago, I could sit through a three or four hour movie without a word of protest. Thinking back, I don't remember having trouble with films like Gettysburg, ...
It has recently occurred to me that seemingly every superhero movie contains a romantic component. Superman has Lois. Spiderman has Mary Jane. Batman has a new girl in every film (must be those rubber nipples). Reed Richards has Sue Storm. ...
If you listen to the mainstream media, Peter Jackson's King Kong is a failure - a box office dud that has underperformed since it opened a week before Christmas. The reality, as is sometimes the case, is less dire. Kong is performing respectably. ...
After what happened after my previous column (the one about Michael Moore), I decided to write about something nice and safe... like the weather. Unfortunately, after this weekend, there's nothing nice or safe about the weather. Normally, I like ...
I thought about writing something about Mel Gibson today, but what's the point? Everyone else is writing about him. He joins Tom Cruise and Lindsay Lohan in the category of self-destructive celebrities. Gibson's problem is twofold: he's an ...
The expected pattern goes like this: after the euphoria created by the great movies of November and December, the critic must gird his/her loins for the dreary months of January through March. That's the way it usually works. 2006, however, has ...
Last year, Chris Rock. This year, Jon Stewart. Next year, who knows? (I'm still hoping for John Cleese.) There's prestige in hosting the Oscars, that's for sure. But once you've done it once, what's the incentive to return? For a while, the ...
Memo to the studios and the MPAA: The way to combat piracy is not to commit highway robbery.What am I talking about? I'm referring to the new marketing strategy that has many movies being made available for broadband download on the same day/date ...