Search for 2005

It's not hard to be enthusiastic about The Matador, an uncommon buddy film starring Pierce Brosnan and Greg Kinnear. The movie has a nicely modulated mix of comedy and pathos, but succeeds as much because of the two lead performances as Richard She...

In my review of Woody Allen's previous misfire, Melinda and Melinda, I wrote the following: "Lately, Allen's films have sunk into a state of heightened mediocrity - sporadically entertaining, but often disappointing, at least for those clinging to ...

Me and You and Everyone We Know, the winner of a Special Jury Prize for "Originality of Vision" at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival, feels like a throwback film to the American independent films of the early 1990s. Today, it's increasingly rare...

Figuring out where Woody Allen's career began its downward spiral requires little more than a glance at his filmography: 1992, with Shadows and Fog. It may be coincidental that his ugly breakup with Mia Farrow occurred shortly thereafter, but Allen ...

It's a recognized fact that many epic love stories of literature and cinema transpire around or during a war. Consider, for example, Casablanca (World War II), Gone with the Wind (the American Civil War), Dr. Zhivago (the Russian Revolution), and ...

How best to encapsulate my feelings about MirrorMask? What about: visually active, but emotionally inert? A lot of descriptors are apt: unorthodox, stylistically inventive, a labor of love, and (perhaps most importantly) a failed experiment. The...

I can understand a sequel to Star Wars. Or Superman. Or The Matrix. Or even Before Sunrise. But Miss Congeniality? Are Hollywood's executives so greedy and creatively bankrupt that they will take any property that made a tidy profit and churn o...

Monster-in-Law is appalling misfire of a comedy - a motion picture that takes a situation ripe for the blackest vein of satire and reduces it to a puerile and edgeless pile of goo. Forgive me for a moment if I bemoan the lost potential here. Give...

The problem with Mr. and Mrs. Smith is that it's really two movies in one. The first is a sly comedy/thriller worthy of Hitchcock, and the other is a big, noisy summer action flick. The marriage of these two, like that of the title characters, is...

For all those who think movies don't have enough naked female flesh, welcome to Mrs. Henderson Presents. It would have been interesting to witness the MPAA's deliberations about this film. There's some violence, but not much. There's no sex or sex-...