The Movie:

I don't remember feeling so sad upon the death of any artist or celebrity than I felt after I heard of Robin Williams' death. Even when my comedy heroes George Carlin and Richard Pryor died, I don't remember feeling numb for days as if a distant yet beloved family member passed away.

Maybe it's because I can revisit specific memories from my life via Williams' work. During the 80s home video rental boom in Turkey, I used to rent every movie with Williams' face on it. Yes, even Club Paradise. Perhaps going to see Dead Poets Society in theatres when I was ten made me realize that I could derive pleasure from genres other than goofy comedies.

Seeing Williams in a perfectly realized dramatic role, a man I had associated with comedies...Read the entire review

The best thing about "Donkey Xote" is its title, a whimsically mischievous little pun. The worst thing about "Donkey Xote" is everything else.

The film, the first CG animated feature to come from Spain, aims to create a charming sequel to the literary classic as told mainly through the eyes of Sancho Panza's mule, Rucio. But the filmmakers are inspired not by Cervantes but by DreamWorks; the tone here is non-stop "Shrek," so much so that the Eddie Murphy character gets a shout-out ("the only talking donkey I know is a friend of mine who hangs out with a green ogre," Rucio jokes). Fart jokes and pop music abound, talking animals make (un)funny faces, and there's even a visual punchline involving - egad - the Macarena.

The basic premise shows some potential: years after Quixote's ...Read the entire review

THE MOVIE:

There are all kinds of fine arguments for why The Mysteries of Pittsburgh is an unsuccessful film, and I'll grant most (perhaps all) of them. And yet, for whatever reason, for me the film worked; it's a messy, uneven picture with a milquetoast lead and a climax that's all wrong, but it's full of memorable performances and small scenes that are brought off beautifully.

It's based on the 1988 novel by Michael Chabon (Wonder Boys, The Adventures of Cavalier and Clay), though it has been much streamlined and reconfigured, according to everything I've read (except the book, which I unfortunately haven't). The story is told by the Art Bechstein (Jon Foster, bland), the son of a powerful Pittsburgh gangster (Nick Nolte), as he remembers the summer after he finished college. "So Art," his father asks, "what are you gonna do this summer?" He doesn't really kno...Read the entire review

THE FILM

It was five years ago when writer/director Rawson Marshall Thurber debuted "Dodgeball," an utterly charming slapstick sports comedy that raked in massive box office coin. Now Thurber has returned with "The Mysteries of Pittsburgh," an introspective art-house melodrama that's about as tonally opposite from "Dodgeball" as can be. Thurber's quest for an adult filmmaking identity is commendable, but "Pittsburgh" is a mess of a movie, looking to contort Michael Chabon's 1988 novel into a darkly personal story of choice and desire. Instead the film sloppily lumbers around in search of a consistent dramatic path. It's handsome enough, just wildly misguided from frame one.

About to embark on his final summer before adulthood, Art Bechstein (Jon Foster) is hop...Read the entire review

The Union: The Business Behind Getting High:
One wonders what to believe in the post-O.J. world. For you youngsters, O.J. Simpson is a famous football player accused and acquitted of killing his wife and a waiter over a pair of glasses. DNA evidence seemed to indicate that O.J. did it, but the glove didn't fit, and the concept of truth got a whole new spin - believe what you want. Pot smokers as well as those adamant in their opinions that pot is evil are in the same boat I think, so I wonder if The Union will turn any heads. This documentary about the business behind getting high posits a number of ideas, works to explode a number of myths, and ultimately concludes that pot is worth a lot more to a lot of people if kept illegal, regardless of the impact on society.

It would be a tough row to hoe, finding a more slickly assembled, synergistic documentary than this. Though a bit overlong (fo...Read the entire review

THE MOVIE:

I don't know about you, but I'm about through with the interconnected multiple storyline structure. The only directors who've shown the ability to pull it off were Robert Altman and Paul Thomas Anderson, and Altman's dead; so, clearly, is the "Altmanesque" multi-character drama. They've been an inescapable indie chestnut since Anderson's Magnolia--a film which basically did it as well as it could be done, not that that's discouraged countless pale imitators. Crash certainly wasn't the worst of the bunch, but its Best Picture win (an honor that escaped Nashville, Short Cuts, and Magnolia) seemed to open the floodgates to the likes of Even Money, The Air I Breathe, Love Actually, Bobby, and Powder Blue, each one straining to tie toget...Read the entire review

Look at this thing. Just look at it. When we say we want our children's movies to have more imagination, this is what we mean.

The film is "Dragon Hunters," a CG-animation adaptation of the French cartoon series of the same name, and it's swimming in a sea of visual invention, a fairy tale that begins in familiar territory but quickly expands to bold new worlds. The kingdom here consists of a series of floating islands, villages, chunks of rock. Dragons abound, of wondrous designs and infinite varieties. Flights of fancy are allowed to fly higher and higher, guided by exceptional animation and unbound creativity.

The series followed Lian-Chu, a gentle warrior whose undersized legs support an oversized torso, as he wanders the countryside with Gwizdo, his fast-talking conman partner, and Hector, a sort of rabbit/dog/dragon creature. They roam in search of dragons to slay - which Gwizdo hop...Read the entire review

The Movie:

JCVD is Being John Malkovich for kickboxing fans, a cleverly stylish and scrappily well-done slice of meta-moviemaking that causes us to rethink Jean-Claude Van Damme, a screen presence who most haven't considered in any terms for the better part of a decade. Few could more reliably open a movie in the early-to-mid 1990s, but Van Damme has fallen out of favor recently, with most of his films taking a quick (and deserved) path directly to DVD.

Van Damme plays "Jean-Claude Van Damme," and surmising as to how much of the character is autobiography is one of the voyeuristic pleasures of the film. To be sure, this is not a vanity project--this Van Damme is a washed-up, past-his-prime action star who can't get a decent job anymore. He's lost a custody battle with one of his many former wives, and he seems forever stuck in straight-to-DVD hell. He returns to Brusse...Read the entire review

JCVD is Being John Malkovich for kickboxing fans, a cleverly stylish and scrappily well-done slice of meta-moviemaking that causes us to rethink Jean Claude Van Damme, a screen presence who most haven't considered in any terms for the better part of a decade. Few could more reliably open a movie in the early-to-mid 1990s, but Van Damme has fallen out of favor recently, with most of his films taking a quick (and deserved) path directly to DVD.

Van Damme plays "Jean Claude Van Damme," and surmising as to how much of the character is autobiography is one of the voyeuristic pleasures of the film. To be sure, this is not a vanity project--this Van Damme is a washed-up, past-his-prime action star who can't get a decent job anymore. He's lost a custody battle with one of his many former wives, and he seems forever stuck in D-list hell. He returns to Brussels to try to get his life back...Read the entire review

A little romantic comedy from the writer of the Broken Lizard Comedy Troupe movies ("Beerfest", "Super Troopers", "Super Troopers 2" and others), "Watching the Detectives" stars Cillian Murphy as Neil, the owner of a little independent video shop that specializes in more independent fare. He spends the day hanging out with his film geek pals Lucien (Michael Panes) and Jonathan (Jason Sudeikis) and wondering what to do about the fact that a chain movie store (called Media Giant, which is really, really subtle) has moved in across the street.

The movie doesn't exactly start in a promising fashion when Neil's girlfriend, Denise (Heather Burns) doesn't show up to the video store party and then breaks up with him the next day because she thinks he doesn't have any direction and runs a video store that doesn't turn a profit.

So, the lead character gets dumped by the irritable, self-centered g...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Watching the Detectives would like to be a screwball romantic comedy in the tradition of What's Up, Doc? , but it confuses kookiness with mental illness. As romantic comedies go, its heart is definitely in the right place, but its head is in a much more precarious position.

Neil (Cillian Murphy) is an amiable guy down on his luck. A certified movie geek, he owns a modest video store (it sells VHS tapes, if that tells you anything) being crowded out by a Blockbuster-type franchise named, appropriately enough, Media Giant. His unsupportive girlfriend (Heather Burns) kicks him to the curb after he subjects her to an oddly passive-aggressive prank; Neil has a waiter spill a glass of water in her lap so he can gauge her reaction. We don't have much time to assess what a creepy move that is on Neil's part, since into his store blows the attractive, wacky and alto...Read the entire review

2007, U.S., 102 minutes, unrated
Writer-director: Thomas Mignone
With: Brittany Snow, Josh Janowicz, Clayne Crawford, Eddie Jemison, Shanna Collins, Candice Accola, Chloe Domont, Angela Sarafyan, Marcus Giamatti, Theresa Russell, James Russo

Music video director Thomas Mignone's debut feature, "On the Doll," a multi-pronged suspense drama set in Los Angeles' porn and prostitution underworld, has big ambitions but gets awfully muddled. "Crash" meets "Pulp Fiction" as several unrelated plots are united, in the course of a jumbled time line, by one stray bullet fired by a cop. That bullet goes off near the start of the movie, moving in slow motion until it hits ... someone. Exactly who isn't revealed until the end of the film, which brings us back to the beginning.

Brittany Snow, the blonde sweetheart from TV's "American Dreams" and "John Tucker Must Die," is the marquee name i...Read the entire review

If The Germs were a seminal L.A. punk band who truly informed the scene with their destructive energy and subversive lyrics, then "What We Do Is Secret" is a botched representation of their seismic impression. Striving to become the definitive word on an explosion of raw musical and philosophical energy, "Secret" is mostly about lukewarm actors playing dress up, walking around in punk heritage boots they can't stand up straight in.

An intelligent child from a broken home, Jan Paul Beahm (Shane West) took off to the Hollywood punk scene, fueled on the teachings of Nietzsche and craving the chaos of the era. Beahm soon changed his name to Darby Crash and formed The Germs, a band proudly made up of musical amateurs such as Pat Smear (Rick Gonzalez) and Lorna Doom (Bijou Philips). Blending noise and verbal contortions, the band took the scene by storm, using guttural performances to build a name, yet ali...Read the entire review

Add Steel City to the list of recent brilliant independent American films that have been ignored by the Academy and at the box office. Made for a mere $350,000, this debut feature film by writer-director Brian Jun is a finely-crafted, authentic and meaningful examination of manhood in contemporary blue-collar America.

P.J. Lee (Tom Guiry), a young man of maybe twenty, is trying to find his way. His father is in jail charged with vehicular homicide. His father's house where he'd been living is going into foreclosure. He works a dead-end restaurant job that won't pay for rent or seemingly even enough to keep his truck running. There's no room at his stepfather's for him. His brother is going through his own mess with a newborn and a wife he's two-timing. P.J. has a girl that seems to care about him, but he's wary about trying to live up to a commitment. Finally, there's a bigger cloud ha...Read the entire review