Search for 2004

Disney's Hidalgo, about a late 19th century long distance horse race across the Arabian Desert, is a sporadically entertaining adventure movie that is hampered by poor pacing, a badly focused screenplay, and cheesy special effects. Seabiscuit this...

Of all the films I have seen in my life, A Hole in My Heart may have been the most disappointing. This is the fourth film from hot Swedish director Lukas Moodysson. Two of his previous three movies, Show Me Love and Lilya 4-Ever, made my year-end...

If you're like me, you probably paid little attention to the attempted genocide that occurred during the civil war in Rwanda in the mid-1990s (more than one million people died). I remember reading about it in the papers and occasionally seeing cli...

Now that Disney has joined Fox and Dreamworks in abandoning traditional animation for that of the 3-D computer generated variety, hand-drawn animation has become an endangered species (although, given the cyclical nature of this sort of thing, it wil...

After seeing two previews for David O. Russell's I Heart Huckabees, I had no idea what it was about. Now, having seen the movie, I still feel like I'm on the outside looking in. I certainly realize why the preview is so obtuse. There's no way that tw...

When all of the dust from 2004's crumbling blockbusters has settled, I, Robot will likely emerge as the strongest mainstream motion picture of the summer. The best big-budget science fiction film since Minority Report, I, Robot gets high marks not...

Universal Pictures is touting In Good Company as being "from the producers of About a Boy." While that's a true enough statement, let's not forget that the team of Chris and Paul Weitz were also responsible for the popular American Pie series. Th...

The Incredibles may become the first Disney/Pixar film not to dominate at the box office. That statement has nothing to do with the film's quality - in fact, The Incredibles is among the best of Pixar's digitally animated movies. However, it's go...

There are times when a movie looks a lot better on screen than it sounds from a description, and Kekexili: Mountain Patrol is an example. The one-sentence synopsis of the movie makes it sound like a dull, quasi-documentary conservationist picture ...

As a concept, Kill Bill has a surfeit of potential. The problems with the film are mostly related to post-production choices, few of which can be said to have resulted in a better product. Taken as a whole, the movie offers its share of tremen...