As a pleasant dose of holiday cheer, The Holiday is a lovable love story with all the Christmas trimmings. In the capable hands of writer-director Nancy Meyers (making her first romantic comedy since Something's Gotta Give), it all begins when two successful yet unhappy women connect through a home-swapping website, and decide to trade houses for the Christmas holiday in a mutual ...
It's not easy being an ogre, but Shrek finds it doubly difficult for an ogre like himself to fill in for a king when his father-in-law King Harold of Far, Far Away falls ill in this third Shrek movie. Shrek's attempts to fulfill his kingly duties play like a blooper reel, with boat christenings and knighting ceremonies gone terribly wrong, and to say that Shrek (Mike Myers) is insecure ...
Praised at the time for Jim Carrey's facial acrobatics as the titular hero, The Mask also had real charm in its use of period-ambiguous settings and intelligent use of its heroine, Cameron Diaz in her first screen role. Carrey is as interesting when he's the put-upon Stanley Ipkiss as he is when he transforms into an amoral cartoon character (thanks to chance discovery of an ancient mask). ...
The original cowriter and director of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was Alex Cox, whose earlier film Sid and Nancy suggests that Cox could have been a perfect match in filming Hunter S. Thompson's psychotropic masterpiece of "gonzo" journalism. Unfortunately Cox departed due to the usual "creative differences," and this ill-fated adaptation was thrust upon Terry Gilliam, whose ...
Almost obliged to be huge, Gangs of New York marks the return to work of three much-admired creatives missing-in-action for the past few years: director Martin Scorsese, Leonardo DiCaprio and Daniel Day-Lewis. Vast, impressive and challenging, it's unlike anything Scorsese has done in look and manner even as it is exactly the material he has obsessively turned over since his first films. A ...
Oliver Stone's Any Given Sunday is a massive 150-minute American football drama which, for all its ferocity and cynicism, is as soft-centred and clichéd as any Rocky-style underdogs-make-good crowd-pleaser. The Miami Sharks have lost three games in a row and their coach, Al Pacino in an intense performance as the only half-decent major character in the film, faces crisis when ...
The lovably ugly green ogre returns with his green bride and furry, hooved friend in Shrek 2. The newlywed Shrek and Princess Fiona are invited to Fiona's former kingdom, Far Far Away, to have the marriage blessed by Fiona's parents--which Shrek thinks is a bad, bad idea, and he's proved right: the parents are horrified by their daughter's transformation into an ogress, a fairy godmother ...
Both of the hit animated movies in one package. Full of verve and wit, Shrek is a computer-animated adaptation of William Steig's delightfully fractured fairy tale. Our title character (voiced by Mike Myers) is an agreeable enough ogre who wants to live his days in peace. When the diminutive Lord Farquaad (John Lithgow) evicts local fairy tale creatures (including the now-famous Seven ...