Swords swing, people fall, music swells, and when all is said done, the legend of “King Arthur” becomes dethroned by its aggravating revisionist take. Finally, a “King Arthur” for people who believe the Spice Girls weren’t the downfall of girl groups in Britain. Read the rest of this entry »

Watching the remake of “The Haunting” is the equivalent of going to a Halloween party you’ve really been looking forward to only to find out that the turd in the punch bowl is real. Forget things that go bump in the night, be afraid of things that go dump in the night. Read the rest of this entry »

The Earth’s core has stopped spinning, and that’s bad. Real bad. Without the magnetic field that it generates, the Earth becomes vulnerable to all sorts of bad things like electrical pulses that stop people wearing pacemakers dead in their tracks, birds losing their sense of direction, fierce storms capable of destroying whole cities. Oh yeah, and bad movies about all of these events. Read the rest of this entry »

How ironic that a film dealing with a man who literally has nothing but time on his hand end up feeling abridged. That’s just one of the problems with the update of H.G. Wells “The Time Machine,” a grin and bear it remake of George Pal’s far superior 1960 film. Read the rest of this entry »

“Possession” isn’t the latest Calvin Klein perfume, but director Neil LaButes’ film of the same name still has the scent of an intelligent, romantic drama. I never had the courage to read A.S. Byatt’s mammoth tome “Possession,” but admire LaButes’ courage to bring the tale of star-crossed lovers to the screen. Read the rest of this entry »

While some may find Paul Thomas Anderson’s epic look at the adult film industry hard to swallow, there’s plenty to recommend it. Anderson’s sophomore film is a rare treat, an adult drama about an adult subject handled in an adult fashion. Anderson and his camera never flinch, but instead manage to get up close and personal with a randy group of adult filmmakers whose world is rocked during the late seventies and early eighties. Read the rest of this entry »

In 1972s Deliverance, four city friends gather for a weekend of canoeing and get caught in a current of backwoods sexual politics and hillbilly justice. Tightly packed into a rubber wetsuit and sporting a deadly bow and arrow, Burt Reynolds emerged as a superstar. Read the rest of this entry »

For those keeping tabs, Dolphins knew all along. They tried to tell us, but being the third smartest species on Earth, we misinterpreted their squeaks and squawks as noise and their back flips as tricks. Humans can be such dunderheads, which makes our demise inconsequential when intergalactic engineers decide to annihilate Earth to build a bypass. Read the rest of this entry »

BIG BAD LOVE (R)

What begins as a light comedy spirals into a dark drama, and writer-director Arliss Howard (who also stars) has difficulty reconciling the two. Each has its own merits, especially the opening half which finds Arliss playing Leon Barlow, a sad sack writer who spends most of his time daydreaming. Read the rest of this entry »

There is a scene two-thirds of the way through Steven Spielberg’s Munich where three undercover agents confront a woman they know guilty of killing one of their team. She knows she’s about to die, and tells the men to look at her, what a waste it would be to kill her. It doesn’t work. Her perfect skin is marred by two black holes. There’s no blood, not yet, just an expression of despair on the woman’s face. She stands up and pets her cat, struggles across the room, and finally slumps into a chair. She is naked. Read the rest of this entry »