Search for 2004

Dear Frankie, the feature debut of director Shona Auerbach, is a cinematic definition of mediocrity. Neither awful nor impressive, it features moments of genuine power and instances when it is cloying. The end result is an unremarkable, unmemorab...

It can be convincingly argued that John Waters' oeuvre is an acquired taste. If that's the case, I haven't yet acquired it. I view Waters as a pre-adolescent male in a state of arrested development. He is obsessed with what kids snickeringly ref...

Of course, Dodgeball isn't a true underdog anything, but that's all part of the joke. A blistering satire of feel-good sports movies, this film makes its mark via the most direct route: it lampoons by adopting the tried-and-true "straight" formul...

As a character study that examines a pair of reprehensible individuals, The Door in the Floor does an excellent job. The problem with the film is simple: how many people want to spend nearly two hours in the company of such characters. The viewe...

Downfall is the third major filmed account of Hitler's final ten days, following in the distant wake of 1973's Hitler: The Last Ten Days and 1981's The Bunker. A superior production to both of the earlier movies, Downfall is a windfall for anyone w...

In Envy, the "Va-poo-rizer" is a liquid that, when sprayed on animal fecal matter, causes the offending substance to disappear. Would that such an invention existed to use on this motion picture… It's remarkably appropriate that Envy is about t...

From the first scene, Eternal seems like a made-for-Cinemax soft porn vampire movie, with one crucial exception. It has the cheesy music. It has the wooden acting by thespians whose names are not destined to top many A-movie marquees. It has the ...

A unique romantic comedy, unfettered by the normal expectations of the genre, is a rare and wondrous thing. That's precisely what director Michel Gondry, working from a screenplay by Charlie Kaufman (Being John Malkovich, Adapatation), delivers. ...

It boggles the mind to consider that the fertile writing team of Alec Berg, David Mandel, and Jeff Schaffer, all of whom spent time scripting episodes of "Seinfeld," could turn out something as abysmally unfunny as Eurotrip. Then again, these guys...

The primary goal of Fahrenheit 9/11 is obvious: offer evidence that President George W. Bush is an incompetent moron and that his administration is corrupt. One might argue that filmmaker Michael Moore does an adequate job of this, except that, to...