A sad, melancholy ache pervades Brokeback Mountain, Ang Lee's haunting, moving film that, like his other movies, explores societal constraints and the passions that lurk underneath. This time, however, instead of taking on ancient China, 19th-century England, or '70s suburbia, Lee uses the tableau of the American West in the early '60s to show how two lovers are bound by their expected ...
If Robert Zemeckis's mega-hit Forrest Gump was too sweet for your taste, you may enjoy the undiluted bitterness of his previous movie, a cynical black comedy that was ahead of its time. Death Becomes Her, an outlandish parable about America's obsession with youth and vanity, exposes the corrosive side of Zemeckis's comic sensibility, the sort of scathing satirical edge he gleefully ...
Well, filmmakers should aim high, they say. And Richard Kelly shot the moon on his highly-anticipated follow-up to cult sensation Donnie Darko, which expands the apocalyptic mood of that movie and blows it up tenfold. Set during the election season of 2008, Southland Tales proposes a series of apparently linked events: the reappearance of a vanished movie star (Dwayne "The Rock" ...
Halloween is one of the great modern horror films, but as a franchise its track record has been spotty at best, painfully bad at worst. Halloween H2O: Twenty Years Later, directed by horror vet Steve Miner (Friday the 13th parts 2 and 3, House), won't displace John Carpenter's original but it might help you forget the films in between. Miner certainly has: the film ...
It's not the scary hit that The Ring was in 2002, but The Grudge makes a similarly convincing case for American remakes of popular Japanese horror films. Barely a year passed between the release of Takashi Shimizu's creepy ghost story Ju-On: The Grudge and the production of this American remake, set in Tokyo and starring Sarah Michelle Gellar in her first post-Buffy ...
Director Jamie Babbit's assured first feature But I'm a Cheerleader is subversive, smart and extremely funny, but not entirely original. Megan Williams (Natasha Lyonne) is a good Christian cheerleading girl. She doesn't think it at all strange that she can't get the image of tumbling cheerleaders out of her mind while her football player boy friend is trying to French kiss her. But her ...
Sandra Goldbacher's intense drama of friendship and betrayal Me Without You was not especially liked by UK reviewers, but opened in the US to rave reviews. Carrying the relationship between two teenagers through their student days and into adulthood, it shows the more obviously charismatic Marina (Anna Friel) as parasitic on her more intelligent friend Holly (Michelle Williams) and then ...