Search for 2005

Some sequels are made too soon, while others are made too late. The Legend of Zorro, Martin Campbell's follow-up to his well-received 1998 feature, The Mask of Zorro, falls into the latter category. It's difficult to say whether the film would ha...

Watching Lords of Dogtown, I momentarily became nostalgic for the summer of 1977, when I would ride my skateboard down my inclined driveway, then see if I could make the sharp turn onto the sidewalk without wiping out. But nostalgia is hardly a re...

Here's a pleasant little romantic comedy that doesn't try too hard and has the virtue of doing a few things differently. Not that it breaks new ground, but there is a little more substance to the story than boy-meets-girl/boy-loses-girl/boy-gets-gi...

Mad Hot Ballroom is about ballroom dancing in the same way that Spellbound is about spelling bees and Hoop Dreams is about basketball. That is to say, tangentially. Although ballroom dancing forms the backdrop against which this uplifting documen...

Eventually, it had to happen: a computer-animated dud. It's surprising it has taken this long, and we have been spoiled by the high quality of the product, with such winning titles as Toy Story, Shrek, Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, and others. B...

The men in black at Columbia Pictures made the right decision when they elected not to screen Man of the House for critics. The film fails in so many ways that it's impossible to imagine it getting more than a handful of positive reviews; all but ...

Hollywood has a long albeit checkered history of mismatched buddy cop films. I don't know when the trend started, but it was elevated in popularity by the partnership of Eddie Murphy and Nick Nolte in 48 Hours. 23 years later, director Les Mayfie...

Let me start with a few brief editorial comments about Lars von Trier. Key to understanding my views about Manderlay is my disclosure of a belief that in order to be able to criticize something, you have to have first-hand familiarity with it. Vo...

March of the Penguins does what all good National Geographic documentaries do: it informs and entertains while providing interesting wildlife footage. Unfortunately, it's not cinematic. The issue isn't whether the film is worth seeing, but whethe...

Apparently, I approached this production with a misapprehension. I was under the impression that Margaret Cho: Assassin was intended to be a filmed comedic performance. What I got instead was an 85-minute political rant from a liberal Asian Ameri...