Peter Schilling Jack Black and Mos Def team with director Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Science of Sleep) to give us this oddball comedy about a man who becomes magnetized and erases the entire inventory of videotapes in his pal’s rental store. (The movie takes place in the ’80s.) They end up having to … Read more
In The Kite Runner (opening Friday in area theaters), actor Homayoun Ershadi plays Baba, an Afghani intellectual and father of the child Amir, whose friendship and eventual betrayal from the servant boy Hassan forms the crux of the story. Ershadi is a graceful actor, whose intelligence and dignity shines in this movie. Originally an architecht, … Read more
It looks like producer J. J. Abrams (the man behind Lost and Alias) took a few cues from legendary horror-meister Val Lewton. In Cloverfield, Abrams’s Godzilla-like monster wreaks havoc on New York City—except he does so at night, and we can’t see a damn thing except shadows and fleeting images of the beast as things … Read more
This is arguably the greatest lucha libre horror film in history. Yes, friends, we know that’s like saying Evan Almighty is the greatest congressional ark-building comedy ever, but this entertaining schlock—starring those masked Mexican wrasslers—cost a hundredth as much, and looks to be ten times more amusing. In Las Momias de Guanajuato (1972), the wrestler/sorcerer … Read more
The latest from director Paul Thomas Anderson (Boogie Nights, Magnolia) is rumored to be a frontrunner for the best-picture Oscar, but that’s highly unlikely. There Will Be Blood is magnificent, epic, and utterly bizarre; films this weird never win the big one. Based loosely on Upton Sinclair’s 1927 novel Oil!, There Will Be Blood features … Read more
Not content as one of the world’s foremost cartoonists (don’t call her a graphic novelist—she loathes that designation), Marjane Satrapi has now made the leap into directing movies, starting with an animated adaptation of her highly acclaimed Persepolis. This modestly budgeted film is a brilliant hybrid of black-and-white and color, fable and memoir, at turns … Read more
The Pedro Infante film festival at the Parkway Theater. Beginning November 16 and running through the 29th. Who is Pedro Infante and why should we care? Why should we brave cold November nights and wander through the city streets to an old theater and watch these Mexican melodramas? For the same old reason we … Read more
“Baby” is thirty-seven years old. This is the claim of one Al Palusky, of Duluth, who considers the black, long-haired cat to be his best friend. This is not news to Al’s wife Mary. “When we were married Al’s priest told him that he couldn’t call Baby his best friend anymore,” she said. Al just … Read more
This ’71 film could simply be described as an homage to guys behind the wheel. James Taylor plays the Driver. The Beach Boys’ Dennis Wilson is the Mechanic. Laurie Bird is the Girl. Together, they motor along Route 66 in their ’55 Chevy. Along the way they meet Warren Oates’s GTO and begin to race—with … Read more
Director Noah Baumbach’s follow-up to his magnificent The Squid and the Whale, Margot at the Wedding looks to be yet another biting examination of family. Here, the acid-tongued title character (Nicole Kidman, whose legacy desperately needs shoring up) visits her sister (Jennifer Jason Leigh—she also could stand a modest hit), who is about to be … Read more