When LA Confidential hit the screens in 1997, I fell into a state of deep adoration. Adoration for Curtis Hanson, a director I hadn't heard much from over the years. Sure, there was the promising The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, way back in 1992, but my appreciation for that film had more to do with the many talents of my beloved Rebecca De Mornay than with Curtis Hanson's directing skills. The formulaic aspects of the film's plot only foreshadowed the director's mediocre thriller The River Wild, which would come a couple years later. None of his previous work even hinted at the narrative strength and noir stylings of LA Confidential. I was a sudden devoted fan of Mr. Hanson, and I even loved his follow-up, 2000's Wonder Boys, for its sweet, pot-glazed characterizations and rambling storyline. Admittedly, I tuned out for 8 Mile, having no interest in the subject...Read the entire review

WHAT'S IT ALL ABOUT?

Keva Rosenfeld's Twenty Bucks is an odd little forgotten gem. Ostensibly following the fate of a $20 bill from the moment it enters circulation, out of an ATM machine and through the hands of a number of interesting people who are interconnected in subtle and unsubtle ways. Although the film has the outward feel of an anthology, offering a series of sometimes-touching and sometimes-humorous vignettes about the various people who get their hands on the bill, Twenty Bucks offers a nice, if broadly drawn, sense of community, of commonality, and of quirky fate. Despite it's sometimes awkward maneuverings, this comedy/drama has a certain charm.

The film starts with the introduction into the world of a fresh $20 bill, which gets swept into the air from the ATM and into the middle of a busy street. Street bum Angeline (Linda Hunt) is the first to find the treas...Read the entire review

WHAT'S IT ALL ABOUT?

Joseph Gaï Ramaka's Karmen Geï is an exuberant African rendition of the classic Bizet opera Carmen, set in Senegal and filled with dark, sweaty writhing in the vein of a Matrix Zion war ritual. From the sensual gyrations of its first scene, it brings a perpetual heat to the screen that's difficult to look away from. That being said, Karmen Geï never solidifies into a complete film and must make do with merely being a bold, beautiful, if frustratingly meandering adaptation.

Karmen (Djeïnaba Diop Gaï) is a dark, lanky, statuesque beauty sultry-dancing through nearly every scene of this film, and even when she's not dancing, you can see the buoyant boogie in her eyes—the gyrations, the bright swaying cloth at her thighs almost revealing the meaning of life. She's filled to brimming with raw sexuality, and because of her, the movie practic...Read the entire review

WHAT'S IT ALL ABOUT?

I've been a casual fan of the quirkrock of They Might Be Giants for years. As a band, they even seem to be mapping their output to my own lifecycle: They were there when my own oddball personality was shaping, through my college years (with wonderfully strange albums such as Flood and Lincoln), and now they're here with some funky kid songs to help shape the impressionable minds of my young daughters. My oldest daughter—at just under 5 years old—is a huge fan of the band's 2002 hit No!, which contains some genuinely smart, knee-slapping kid fare that nostalgic adults can equally enjoy. I'm thinking of such terrific track-listing standouts as Fibber Island, Robot Parade, Where Do They Make Balloons?, and The House at the Top of the Tree. I can't tell you how often we've listened to that CD and how much joy They Might Be ...Read the entire review

WHAT'S IT ALL ABOUT?

I can tell that Robert "Bobby" Dubac is a funny guy. He's got a sharp wit, and keen observational skills. But there's a certain rigid, practiced air to his comic stylings in this presentation of Inside the Male Intellect, a smirk-faced smugness that tends to detract from what is generally entertaining material. Inside the Male Intellect is a stage-play comedy about the battle of the sexes in which Dubac—black-clad and strutting—walks through a somewhat stiffly choreographed standup routine and segues now and then into a series of exaggerated characters that illustrate his points about the different aspects of the male intellect, all in an effort to understand women.

"Behind this curtain is the inside of my brain," he states at the start of his show. "This is the left side, my male chauvinistic side," he says, pointing to the dorm-room side of the stage...Read the entire review

WHAT'S IT ALL ABOUT?

The kooky coming-of-age road-trip saga Fandango has aged pretty well. Combining elements of heartfelt drama and silly slapstick, it's not often clear what Fandango is trying to be: Is it an Animal House-style Easy Rider or is it going for a Midnight Run-ish Big Chill kind of vibe? I think it's going for all those things, and if you're in the right frame of mind, Fandango offers modest pleasures, not least of which is Kevin Costner in a genuinely satisfying comic performance.

Fandango is one of those leisurely films that just wanders from comic situation to poignant character moment and back again. It takes its cue from films such as American Grafitti, stringing a series of humorous moments together and letting its characters undergo profound growth as a simple byproduct of the collective experience. Fanda...Read the entire review

WHAT'S IT ALL ABOUT?

Here's an effective little paranoid thriller with one of the worst titles I've ever seen committed to film. I must admit that Jeff Renfroe and Marteinn Thorsson's Paranoia: 1.0 (originally titled, no better or worse, One Point O) caught me by pleasant surprise, offering up an out-of-nowhere, moody little psychodrama with an intellectually adventurous style and Kafkaesque vibe. Paranoid: 1.0 isn't a perfect film, and in fact it bites off a little more than it can chew, but this is a film worth watching, and perhaps even rewatching, for the sheer weirdness of it all.

The film is an anticonsumerism-sci-fi-pseudo-1984-mind-bender, twisting and turning through the strange realities of its off-kilter characters. Simon (Jeremy Sisto) is a paranoid IT dude living in about the same universe in which Dark City takes place. He lives in an oppres...Read the entire review

WHAT'S IT ALL ABOUT?

At least one admirable decision has come out of the creation of George Lucas' tragically legend-crumbling Star Wars prequel trilogy, and that is to hire Samurai Jack's Genndy Tartokovsky to animate a series of short fill-in-the-backstory cartoons to expand the universe of the feature films. The Cartoon Network, in association with Lucasfilm, presents Star Wars: Clone Wars as a striking series of 20 three-minute micro-cartoons that essentially fill in the storyline between 2002's Episode II: Attack of the Clones and 2005's Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, dramatizing the fabled Clone Wars that will be largely skipped over by the movies, which tend more toward talky, silly material than, you know, wars in space.

If you're at all drawn to the Star Wars universe—and I admit with heavy heart that I am, despite my feelings about t...Read the entire review

WHAT'S IT ALL ABOUT?

I missed this fun little popcorn thriller while it was in theaters and, based on the recommendation of a friend, decided to give it a shot on DVD. I'm glad I waited for DVD, because this disc offers up a hell of a presentation—particularly in the audio department—and it ain't a half bad B-flick actioner, perfect for the rumbling home-theater experience. Flight of the Phoenix—a remake of the 1965 James Stewart film—didn't make much of a dent at the box office, no thanks to me, but here's a movie that should find a healthy disc life.

Somewhere in Mongolia, the Amacore Corporation is in the process of shutting down a failed oil well. In a whirl of sand, hotshot pilots Frank Towns (Dennis Quaid) and AJ (Tyrese) show up to clear out the oil-rig crew and fly them home. Among the crew are feisty chief Kelly Johnson (Miranda Otto), an enigmatic little gnome name...Read the entire review

WHAT'S IT ALL ABOUT?

Walter Salles' curiously nostalgic The Motorcycle Diaries is a tough film to decipher. Perhaps you've heard some buzz about this film, about its fun-lovin' road-trip cheerfulness or about the chummy camaraderie of its central characters as they motor their way through 50s-era South America, having life-changing adventures and generally finding their personalities shaped. Or perhaps you know a little more about this film, that its central character is a teenaged Ernesto Guevara, who would much later take on the moniker Che and become a spectacularly controversial Communist leader who some call a folk hero and others call a murderous coward. Either way, you're in for an interesting story—one that either compels with its surface gloss or confounds you with its startling historical disconnect.

You've probably seen the image of Che Guevara on a tee-shirt or poster s...Read the entire review

WHAT'S IT ALL ABOUT?

I don't know how they do it.

Trey Parker and Matt Stone have been creating South Park episodes for going on nine seasons, and somehow—despite their admitted procrastinating natures and vocally careless attitudes—this show just keeps getting more and more outrageous and more bitingly funny. South Park remains a bewildering phenomenon, a show that you might have thought would last a few episodes when it all began in 1997 but that has endured spectacularly and has developed an appreciative audience of naughty-humor junkies and fans of the gross-out. In this, the show's fifth season, Parker and Stone have somehow not only kept South Park ground-breaking, they've also come up with a number of enduring fan favorites. I'm not saying it's a perfect season—it's got a couple of clunker scenarios, one of them being the lame lion-habitat sequences in "Her...Read the entire review

WHAT'S IT ALL ABOUT?

You might be familiar with the work of director Gary Winick. He's the founder of InDigent, which produces ultra-low-budget DV productions, including his own highly regarded Tadpole (2002). He's also the helmer of the much-higher-budgeted Jennifer Garner concoction 13 Going on 30. Although Winick seems to be transitioning his career from microbudget experimental projects to big-budget family pleasers (witness next year's adaptation of Charlotte's Web, starring the ubiquitous Dakota Fanning, and Julia Roberts as the voice of Charlotte), he got his start in infinitesimal films like Sam the Man (2000), a movie with admirable intentions that you might call the tiniest of noble failures.

Winick envisioned a series of films produced with budgets of less than 100 grand, shot on cheap digital-video cameras, and created by craftsman willing to work for...Read the entire review

WHAT'S IT ALL ABOUT?

There's a moment you'll experience while watching Donnie Darko: The Director's Cut when Frank the giant rabbit whispers, as if into your ear, "Watch closely." Ostensibly, the disturbingly insect-masked bunny is talking to the film's reluctant hero, Donnie, but he's really speaking directly to you, yes you, the audience member, and let's get right down to it, it's not really a huge rabbit telling you to watch closely—it's the film's director, Richard Kelly, cluing you in on just one of the little bits of his sci-fi head-scratcher that will surely open up the film's meaning to you. Trouble is, I don't know of anyone—particularly Donnie Darko's fervent and vocal fans—who ever requested that the film's weirdly appealing and nutty sci-fi mysteries be so baldly spelled out.

If you've never seen Donnie Darko and the notion of a large talking rabbit i...Read the entire review

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Largely dismissed by critics during its theatrical run in September 2004, Joseph Ruben's The Forgotten is a fine, albeit modest little thriller with a single admirable goal—to creep you out in the unnerving tradition of The Twilight Zone or The X-Files. Inexplicably, given my past appreciation for the work of Ruben (particularly The Stepfather) and the film's star, Julianne Moore, I missed the film in theaters, and have just discovered it on DVD. Coming from that perspective—expectations low, after the critical drubbing—I've found that The Forgotten is a shocker of fascinating thematic concerns that could have been great but settles for hair-raising B-movie goodness.

The central conceit of the film—not only losing your child but finding that everyone around you insists the child never existed—provided fodder for an excellent...Read the entire review

WHAT'S IT ALL ABOUT?

James Toback's curiously off-putting When Will I Be Loved is a tough film to peg. It's the kind of cinematic exploration that you endure more than you enjoy, and when it ends, you sit there wondering what the director has just done to you. Typically, that's an experience I crave in a film—to be in the hands of a director who knows how to use the tools of his art to provoke an emotion or a particular reaction—but in the case of When Will I Be Loved, I'm left feeling more annoyed than expertly manipulated.

Much of When Will I Be Loved has the aura of an unfinished, scattershot, pretentious student film. It's a meandering, unfocused mess until it reaches its point—a main plot that might seem more comfortable as the impetus for a powerful short film or the fodder of an old mainstream effort, like, oh, Indecent Proposal. Neve Campbell plays ...Read the entire review

WHAT'S IT ALL ABOUT?

Christopher Munch's Color of a Brisk and Leaping Day is a delight to look at, with its gorgeous black-and-white photography of the grandeur of the Yosemite Valley. Combined with its gentle focus on the unfortunate fate of the legendary Yosemite Valley Railroad, the film promises a visually arresting, heartwarming, and nostalgic experience, but it really only gets the first part right. The tale atop the imagery—and, worse, the characters—never quite do the setting justice.

First, the good stuff: The black-and-white cinematography of Color of a Brisk and Leaping Day is absolutely Ansel Adams scrumptious, capturing your imagination and really casting you back into the time period with which the film is concerned—World War 2-era California. Yosemite's natural wonders marry spectacularly with the monochrome treatment, and the serene movement of the camer...Read the entire review

WHAT'S IT ALL ABOUT?

Foreshadowing the summer release of M. Night Shyamalan's The Village, the Sci-Fi channel controversially aired the mysterious Buried Secret of M. Night Shyamalan, a 2-hour supposed "documentary" about the man and his movies, focusing on the making of his latest. Perhaps you remember the press surrounding this strange little "nonfiction" film? In the days preceding its broadcast, Shyamalan publicly protested the film, supposedly wanting to prevent you from absorbing its shocking revelations. The truth is that The Buried Secret of M. Night Shyamalan is just a smirky, absurd mockumentary with high production values and a big ego. It reeks of marketing hype. And a lot of people fell for it.

Gosh, a lot of people are gullible.

Early on, we meet the documentary's "director," Nathaniel Kahn, who's simply carrying out a Sci-Fi channel assignment to produ...Read the entire review

WHAT'S IT ALL ABOUT?

In its glossy efforts to portray the insanity of high-school football in West Texas, writer/director Peter Berg's Friday Night Lights carries some surprising emotional heft. Going into it, you might expect a certain kind of cheery, formulaic Hollywood sports flick in which our protagonists face inevitable challenges, overcome them, and win the big game while absorbing a big ol' wallop of redemption. Instead, Berg steadfastly avoids such clichés, delving a bit more deeply into his story and setting and characters, and delivering an above-average sports meditation.

Based on Buzz Bissinger's nonfiction bestseller of the same name, Friday Night Lights chronicles the 1988 season of the celebrated Odessa-Permian Panthers, a West Texas high-school team that faces impossibly high expectations from all directions: the school, the community, even the players' frien...Read the entire review

WHAT'S IT ALL ABOUT?

Ever since his breakthrough film The Sixth Sense, writer/director M. Night Shyamalan has struggled with an unfortunate stigma—that of the twist ending. It's really his own fault. The Sixth Sense boasts one of the most powerful and effective shock endings in the history of film, and it helped elevate the film to the box-office stratosphere. Reluctant to veer from a spectacularly successful formula, Shyamalan followed up that film with another one tricked out with a twist at the end: Unbreakable. Instantly, Shyamalan became typecast behind the camera as a master of the surprise ending, and his audience would now expect some kind of marvelous revelation at the end of every film he brought to the screen thereafter. It's an unfortunate widespread assumption, and it has become a terrible burden on poor Shyamalan, who—in his most recent two films, Sig...Read the entire review

WHAT'S IT ALL ABOUT?

This third season set of Mike Judge's very funny King of the Hill is at once very gratifying and a bit disappointing. The show itself is a lot of fun (as long as you "get" its humor), and at this point, it's really starting to come into its own as the kookily edgy adult cartoon it is today. Its humor is further maturing, and its characters are deepening further, exploring new areas of humor and even sitcom emotion. It's finding its "sweet spot" more often and with more accuracy than it did in its first two seasons. I definitely find it to be a more successful overall season that Season 2. All that being said, this third season set is a real letdown when it comes to its DVD package. Bereft of any supplements whatsoever, King of the Hill: The Complete Third Season is a surprising barebones release, considering the fun and informative extras on the previous rele...Read the entire review

WHAT'S IT ALL ABOUT?

If you're a fan of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind—and you probably are, given that it's one of the most popular and critically acclaimed films of the year—you already own it on DVD. Universal released a perfectly fine disc of this film on September 28, 2004, and now, a mere 3 months later, they're re-releasing the same disc plus an extra disc containing four modest new features and calling it a Special 2-Disc Collector's Edition. Oh, how Universal understands and exploits our collective willingness to just bend over and take it. Well, I cry "Foul!" I'd like to take this opportunity to plead with you, up front, to avoid purchasing this shameless new edition, if only to send a message that this type of marketing behavior is simply not cool.

And it couldn't have happened to a finer film.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is an extrem...Read the entire review

"Whoa!"
—Neo

Easily weighing in as the most exhaustive DVD treatment of a film series in 2004, The Ultimate Matrix Collection is daunting in its mere description—10 discs holding everything you ever wanted to know about The Matrix trilogy. Debuting in two incarnations—a standard edition and a Limited Edition—that vary only in their packaging, the set is a Matrix monster, plugging you in to a brand-new visual presentation of the first film and assembling a vast array of heretofore unseen special features and, for good measure, also throwing in some stuff you might already have in your collection.

Particularly if you're a fan of the saga, this set is going to deliver some redundancy. But can you resist the sheer coolness of this comprehensive behemoth? The Ultimate Matrix Collection is a scrumptious, only slightly flawed film-school compendium of a re...Read the entire review

WHAT'S IT ALL ABOUT?

Tian Zhuangzhuang's Springtime in a Small Town is a poetic, ponderous remake of a celebrated 1948 Chinese film by Fei Mu. You might know Zhuangzhuang's name—he directed the politically charged The Blue Kite in 1993 and was promptly banned for 9 years from filmmaking in China. Springtime in a Small Town marks his return to the cinema, and although the film is decidedly more personal and insular than The Blue Kite, it's every bit as powerful and marks the homecoming of a uniquely insightful director.

Springtime in a Small Town is a faithful recreation of the earlier work (originally titled Spring in a Small Town), offering up a resonant tale of repressed emotion against the backdrop of a crumbling, post-WW2 China. As we behold the ruin of a physically and emotionally seared landscape, we're carefully introduced to the mysterious...Read the entire review

WHAT'S IT ALL ABOUT?

Peter Gabriel has always had a special affinity for the music-video medium, exploring a plethora of special film and video techniques in the interest of infusing his music with a manic visual energy. His solo career has always held my interest, and I credit not only his strong, worldly sense of progressive pop-rock but also his visual inventiveness during the era when music videos were just coming into their own. I have strong memories of my first viewings of such videos as Shock the Monkey and Sledgehammer, which wowed me from out of a crowd of bland, stagy concert clips from other bands.

Peter Gabriel: Play collects all of Gabriel's music videos and throws them randomly together in a package that boasts—above all—supreme audio quality, and a nice array of modest supplements. At first, I wished that the videos had been presented here chronologi...Read the entire review

WHAT'S IT ALL ABOUT?

Here's an early film from Denys Arcand—creator of Jesus of Montreal and the recent, highly regarded The Barbarian Invasions—that might remind you of Lawrence Kasdan's superior The Big Chill, but only superficially. Both films strive to examine the inner lives of a group of characters who are thrown together for a weekend and end up commiserating about sex and relationships and life in general. The difference is that Kasdan's film resonates with strong writing and emotionally powerful acting, whereas the writing and performances in Arcand's misfire are surprisingly uninvolving and stagey and arch. The voluminous dialog in The Decline of the American Empire feels written and fake—as if it's struggling under the weight of a heavy agenda—and the actors exhibit a universal flatness, as if they're all distanced from the material and una...Read the entire review

WHAT'S IT ALL ABOUT?

You might be—as I am—a devoted Aimee Mann fan from the Til Tuesday days of "Voices Carry," when her uniquely powerful voice probably beguiled you with its curious mixture of raw emotion and bristling self-confidence. From those days of heady Top 40 radio play, Aimee Mann has matured into an even more captivating solo talent, exploring a deeply personal, alternative mode of musical expression. Through records such as Whatever, I'm With Stupid, the soundtrack to P.T. Anderson's epic Magnolia, Bachelor No. 2, and her recent Lost in Space, she's traveled a somewhat thorny path through the music industry, enduring thoughtless studio execs and career setbacks, and ultimately eschewing the frustrations of an uncaring industry and actually founding her own label.

From Aimee Mann's own SuperEgo Records comes this splendid DVD/CD set—enti...Read the entire review

WHAT'S IT ALL ABOUT?

From the History Channel and bEQUAL ("Smart Games for Family Fun") comes an "edutainment" game on DVD called Time Troopers. It's a 2-disc historical-trivia game that will strike you as a high-tech, virtual Trivial Pursuit show. That concept might seem a bit deadening, but thankfully John Cleese himself shows up to enliven the proceedings, portraying our host, Special Agent Wormold of the fictional, futuristic, "ultra-secretive" IM-6 agency. I admire the two companies' efforts to teach history to families in this way, but I encountered a few problems while navigating the game.

Once I got past the cute little video introductions, I started out by playing the Individual mode, which is the competitive mode (rather than Team mode, which is the cooperative mode), on my Denon 2900 DVD player, and found that navigation was hobbled by glitches. According to the ga...Read the entire review

WHAT'S IT ALL ABOUT?

With lofty aspirations to be some kind of soaring, resonant medieval epic of redemption, Brock Morse's Westender falls woefully short—despite its great intentions—and comes across as a bunch of earnest Renaissance Festival performers horsing around in the Oregon forests, where this film was lensed. The cast and crew behind Westender are certainly doing their best, though, and their aim to please is obvious—the acting is enthusiastic, the cinematography and careful editing are first-class, and the score by Rob Simonsen is vibrant and powerful. You have to at least give this troupe credit for trying. But there's no getting around the fact that Westender is low-rent entertainment, built on a wobbly foundation of derivative hamminess.

Still, although your first instinct might be to smirk at most of Westender's goings-on, there's stuff to l...Read the entire review

WHAT'S IT ALL ABOUT?

A frequently mesmerizing, glossy tale of love and mystery, Ferzan Ozpetek's Facing Windows has a visual and tonal confidence that draws you in and bolts you to your seat—until the moment, halfway through the film, when you realize that it's a film that's just trying to do too much. An intriguing and haunting beginning, a tight ensemble of energetic Italian performers, a bouncy and infectious score, and an absolutely luminous lead actress—it all gets the film off to a fine start, and those elements are nearly enough to carry you through to film's end, when Facing Windows' myriad elements come together in a brash, dramatic crescendo. But not quite.

Walking the streets of Rome, beautiful Giovanna (Giovanna Mezzogiorno) and her husband Filippo (Filippo Nigro) are having a minor argument when they come across a dazed-looking older gentleman named Simone (M...Read the entire review

WHAT'S IT ALL ABOUT?

I discovered the angrily enlightened comedy of Bill Hicks about five years ago—sadly, long after his premature death at the hands of pancreatic cancer in 1994. I gobbled up the few standup CDs on the market (the still-available Relentless, Dangerous, Arizona Bay, and Rant in E-Minor) and enjoyed them for Hicks' fascinating amalgam of seething political rage, cynical social commentary, and, as he put it, "purple-veined dick jokes." Hicks was just climbing to popular notoriety when he succumbed to his illness, and today a sizeable cult following has developed in his memory. He was the type of comic that transcends the standup medium and becomes more of a preacher or social pundit (he's been compared to the legendary Lenny Bruce)—but he wasn't above playing to the lowest common denominator, either. At a Bill Hicks show, you could count on a ple...Read the entire review

WHAT'S IT ALL ABOUT?

Richard Linklater's 1995 film Before Sunrise, which stars a dashing young Ethan Hawke and an adorably baby-faced Julie Delpy as strangers who meet in Vienna to share a single memorable night of intimate conversation, is one of the most effective and haunting romantic movies I've come across. It hits all my buttons—and, believe me, romantic films rarely hold any sway over me. So it's saying a lot when I admit that Before Sunrise is, for me, pretty much all by itself among the countless love stories on celluloid. This is a romantic film that conveys exactly the right levels of youth and love and innocence and naïveté and smarts. It's a film that stays with you, despite the fact that it hasn't got much of a plot … and its dialog sometimes has that not-quite-real indy-film sheen of intellectual fantasy … and it ends on a note of ambiguity. But that ambigu...Read the entire review

WHAT'S IT ALL ABOUT?

Duncan Roy's aka comes with an interesting back story, one you might want to be aware of before you view the film. It's a film that appeared in theaters in an unusual format—which the director calls a "triptych," spreading three frames of overlapping, simultaneous action across the screen (reminiscent of Mike Figgis's Time Code, which used four quadrants). In this "triptych" format, the film received modest festival acclaim. Interestingly, for the DVD, Roy has chosen to present aka in the usual single-frame format, and it's a decision that radically changes the effect of the film—for the worse, in this reviewer's opinion. Fortunately, however, the "triptych" version of aka is available on the disc, in the supplements section, so that you can compare the two formats and marvel over the difference in effect.

Either way you watch the film, i...Read the entire review

WHAT'S IT ALL ABOUT?

You might call Yann Samuell's Love Me If You Dare the dark, petulant sibling of Jean-Pierre Jeunet's wondrous Amelie. If you loved Jeunet's colorfully zany, frothy concoction, you might find yourself (as I was) drawn to this quirky film, which in many ways—despite sharing an elemental Frenchness and a similar visual style—is the antithesis of Amelie. Whereas Amelie is a tale of humorous romantic optimism, Love Me If You Dare ends up as more of a sour, vengeful story about doomed love. And yet Samuell stages his story in a whimsical fashion that suits Amelie far better, making this film seem merely derivative. Here, the effect of the cotton-candy stylings turns Love Me If You Dare into a strange, sickly sweet hypocrisy.

We're introduced to the film's romantic protagonists early in their lives. Young Julien (Thibault Ve...Read the entire review

WHAT'S IT ALL ABOUT?

Produced by Xilam, a French graphics company known primarily for video-game work, Kaena: The Prophecy is a strange CG-animated concoction that will conjure inevitable comparisons with Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, if only for its stabs at computer-generating realistic human characters in a fantasy setting. You might also find yourself unable to stop comparing Xilam's efforts to those of American CG giants such as Pixar. And, true, Kaena's look suffers noticeably in the face of its stylistic forbears—as you'll see immediately as this strangely gawky film begins unfurling before you. Xilam doesn't command nearly the budget freedom of a company like Pixar, and for that, you might find yourself forgiving a lot. What can't be forgiven, however, is the fact that the animators seem to have forgotten the all-importance of character and story. (I ...Read the entire review

WHAT'S IT ALL ABOUT?

Beloved by males everywhere for the amount of flesh displayed by its lead actress—a fearless Angelina Jolie, who would afterward ascend to superstardom—Gia is a mediocre and overlong HBO-produced look at the rise and fall of a supermodel. Filled with histrionics and melodrama, Gia is a chore to sit through, mainly because of its wear-out-its-welcome length, but at least it's often made quite bearable by Jolie's go-for-broke performance (which, in retrospect, couldn't help but catapult her to celebrity), as well as her complete lack of inhibition in her willingness to display her, uh, considerable charms. God bless her.

Kicking off with a faux-documentary style in which those close to her tearfully dredge up reminiscences, Gia takes us on a brief tour of Gia Carangi's precocious youth, then a stroll through her bubblegum-popping teen years...Read the entire review