In recent years, the term "director's cut" has undergone a devaluation. It has become a marketing term, appended to DVDs to enhance their salability. Often, a "director's cut" will be essentially the same as the theatrical cut, except with a few trivial snipped scenes restored. It's no wonder that consumers can no longer tell the difference between a "director's cut," an "extended edition," and an "unrated version." Kingdom of Heaven: Director's Cut, is a rare title that deserves the label. Radically altered from the financially unsuccessful version that unspooled in theaters in the summer of 2005, Kingdom of Heaven: Director's Cut restores 45 minutes of footage and transforms a compelling-yet-frustrating movie into a breathtaking epic.
Stealth is not really a new movie at all, but rather a mix of about 5 movies thrown into one. The best way to sum up the film is to use a quote from the Owen Wilson and Eddie Murphy comedy I, Spy...
"Now that was a big explosion!"
From start to finish, Stealth is basically one explosion after another. Almost everything you see in the film eventually gets blown to bits. People, places, things, it makes no difference, all are eventually sent sent to a fiery grave in one way or another. We aren't talking about a house fire here either; most things are elaborately exploded or imploded in a spectacular show of pyrotechnics.
If you're an action fan, it sounds not too bad so far, right?
Nothing is more thrilling to me than exciting stories of incredible adventures. We have all heard them. Tales of daring feats and encounters with the likes of witches and werewolves delighted me as a child, and I suspect I'm not the only one. So often written down on paper, it takes a director of the calibre of Tim Burton to really do them justice on the big screen.
Burton's wonderfully artistic direction does not disappoint this time around. Big Fish is a beautifully realised retelling of Daniel Wallace's novel. The director captures the fantastic heart of Edward Bloom's stories and creates an incredibly visceral adventure story that doesn't rely on unnecessary device to entertain.
Even when Terry Gilliam's latest leap into the wild blue of futuristic fantasy is at its most confounding, you leap along with him. Such is the seductive power of his twisted imagination. Whether it's Monty Python, Brazil, Time Bandits or The Fisher King, Gilliam guarantees a thrilling ride. 12 Monkeys is no exception. Bruce Willis, in an eruptive performance of startling emotional intensity, stars as Cole, a prisoner tagged for an experiment that may get him killed.
The year is 2035. Nearly 40 years earlier, a killer virus spared only 1 percent of the planet's population. In a lab located under the city of Philadelphia, scientists prepare to wrap the naked Cole in condomlike latex and zap him back to 1996 to find out how to reclaim the earth. Above ground the city is uninhabitable, except by the wild animals who roam deserted skyscrapers and department stores. Gilliam, along with the gifted cinematographer Roger Pratt and production designer Jeffrey Beecroft, fashions a disturbing and dazzling lost world.
Sin City is the most visually inventive comic book adaptation to make its way to a movie screen. While other directors have attempted to remain faithful to the look and "feel" of their source material, Robert Rodriguez has taken things a step further, by using Frank Miller's graphic novels as storyboards and immersing the audience neck-deep in the noir currents of Miller's den of iniquity. It's easy to get lost in Sin City. There's something to appreciate around every corner - the gritty characters, the uncompromising story, and, most of all, visuals to astound and amaze. "Eye candy" doesn't even begin to describe what Rodriguez has accomplished.
It is almost beyond belief that Lukas Moodysson should have abandoned so spectacularly the feelgood humanism of his first two features, Show Me Love and Together. Those were Swedish fables of love, family and friendship which bathed us in a warm and fuzzy comforting glow. But he has moved to a new level of inspiration with this dark masterpiece: a vivisectional experiment in horror and despair.
It is an uncompromisingly bleak, devastatingly powerful study of Lilya (Oksana Akinshina), a poverty-stricken teenage girl abandoned in a crumbling Russian town when her mother leaves, apparently for the United States, with a man she has met through a dating agency - and refuses to take her with them. In her wretchedness, Lilya finds a friend in a lonely 11-year-old boy, Volodya (Artyom Bogucharsky), but then precisely duplicates her mother's betrayal when she meets a smooth-talking young guy who says he can take her away to Sweden.
The Mist is what a horror film should be - dark, tense, and punctuated by just enough gore to keep the viewer's flinch reflex intact. In fact, that movie's ending is so uncompromising that one must assume director Frank Darabont had final cut so the studio couldn't interfere. (It's worth noting that the ending is not the same as that of Stephen King's novella, but I won't mention how it has changed.) Darabont has fashioned a tense motion pictures that's ultimately more about paranoia, religious fanaticism, and the price of hopelessness than it is about monsters. But the creatures are present and accounted for, lurking in the white-out that is the mist. Someone has finally succeeded where John Carpenter failed with The Fog.
If there is a sucker born every minute, then the same can also be said of films about confidence tricksters. In the last year we have already seen 'Nine Queens' and 'Confidence' - but what makes 'Matchstick Men' stand out from the crowd is that it is in fact three films morphed seamlessly into one. Figuring that by now viewers have become jaded with the predictable, cross double-cross triple-cross trajectory of your average con film, 'Matchstick Men' also offers a psychological profile of a conflicted, conscience-plagued career criminal, and throws a credible family drama into the mix for good measure - all of which makes for a surprisingly substantial film whose many facets leave you with plenty more to digest after the final credits have rolled than just who did what to whom and how (although it certainly has that too).
The human mind controls everything that we see, feel and experience, yet it is still a mystery to scientists. It interprets the images that flash before our eyes, and in extreme cases, acts as a defence mechanism, burying shocking memories deep within the subconscious.
Tom Witzky (Kevin Bacon), a devoted family man with a loving wife Maggie (Kathryn Erbe) and five-year-old son Jake (Zachary David Cope), has a special gift which has been hidden in the deepest recesses of his mind since birth: he possesses the ability to see the spirits of the dead.
Late one night at a boozy party, Tom jokingly agrees to be hypnotised by his new age sister-in-law Lisa (Illeana Douglas). Once under her spell, Lisa tells Tom to open his mind completely to the world around him, thereby unleashing his dormant powers.
We all know that the white-bread cookie-cutter suburban lifestyle has its own dirty secrets, but when his camera explores the limits of this seemingly serene and ubiquitous American lifestyle, Larry Clark gives us a horrifying yet touching glimpse of what happens behind finely paved driveways and cute lawns.
The film itself portrays so many "unshowable" taboos—a threesome between three adolescents, a teen who masturbates on camera while asphyxiating himself, a tough-love alcoholic father attempting to give his son a blowjob—that you are tempted to delegate the film to nothing more than a provocation film. Yet, frighteningly, Larry Clark is able to pull off filming these morally antagonizing subjects with so much perception, light, and even humanity that he leaves the viewer stunned—stuck between laughter and disgust, horror and compassion, not knowing what we should feel or what we are.
You don’t need to wait for Angelina Jolie to rise from the vaporous depths naked and dripping liquid gold to know that this “Beowulf†isn’t your high school teacher’s Old English epic poem. You don’t even have to wait for the flying spears and airborne bodies that — if you watch the movie in one of the hundreds of theaters equipped with 3-D projection — will look as if they’re hurtling directly at your head. You could poke your eye out with one of those things! Which is precisely what I thought when I first saw Ms. Jolie’s jutting breasts too.
Ms. Jolie plays the bad girl in “Beowulf,†a wicked demon, the mother of all monsters — here, Grendel, played by Crispin Glover — who can switch from hag to fab in the wink of a serpentine eye. If you don’t remember this evil babe from the poem, it’s because she’s almost entirely the invention of the screenwriters Roger Avary and Neil Gaiman and the director Robert Zemeckis, who together have plumped her up in words, deeds and curves. These creative interventions aren’t especially surprising given the source material and the nature of big-studio adaptations. There’s plenty of action in “Beowulf,†but even its more vigorous bloodletting pales next to its rich language, exotic setting and mythic grandeur.
Great horror movies seem as hard to find lately as a movie geared to adults in the local multiplex. The last few years have been overloaded with extremely generic, dull and unoriginal horror films, and I use the term ‘horror’ very lightly. I can hardly remember the last time I was frightened at a horror film or even winced once in fear (although I have winced at the utter pain of watching some of that garbage, like the recent failure Valentine). I’ve almost lost all hope that Hollywood would ever churn out good horror movies again. That was until I saw The Others.
The Others is a throwback to those older (and wiser) horror films that would build a foundation of terror and dread slowly and thoughtfully, and then scare the audience out of their skin in the finale. Rosemary’s Baby and The Shining come to mind. The Others successfully builds an overall sense of terror and madness slowly and methodically through the first hour or so, using real fear and emotion to elicit screams rather than a man in a mask popping in and out of closets all night. The final half an hour is a nail-biting fright-fest with great twists and some genuinely scream-out-loud moments. The finale is so satisfying and surprising it left me wanting to see it again.
A revenge thriller is a tough animal to tame. Go too far in one direction and you're practically advocating vigilante behavior -- but if you err on the safe side your drama begins to feel like a flaccid little network flick. Third-time director James Wan (Saw, Dead Silence) deserves some hearty praise for trying to balance hard-edged escapism with some surprisingly ambiguous social commentary -- even if the two approaches sometimes mix as well as oil and vinegar. But "more than half a brain" is what this dark-hued action thriller has to offer, and nowadays that's just enough to get excited about. (Had the flick been full-bore bloodthirstiness, I suspect it would have gotten really tiresome after about 25 minutes or so.)
After viewing Casino, you may never look at Las Vegas in quite the same way. While this film, adapted from Nicholas Pileggi's nonfiction book, Casino: Love and Honor in Las Vegas, doesn't offer much in the way of startling revelations, it presents a fascinating insider's perspective of what goes on behind-the-scenes in the country's gambling mecca. As is stated several times, Vegas isn't about fun, glitz, or glamour. Those things are just the surface gloss. Instead, it's all about greed and money -- bringing customers in, keeping them playing, and sucking them dry.
One of my favorite moments in "Galaxy Quest" takes place as a Red Digital Readout is ticking off the second until a spaceship is blown to smithereens. The only person who can save it is a teenage science fiction fan far away on Earth--and he has just been ordered by his mother to take out the garbage. But then the ship is saved! How? I won't spoil the moment, except to say the ship is modeled in every possible respect on a ship that appears on a TV show, and that includes a digital readout that is also consistent with TV cliches.
"Galaxy Quest" begins at a convention for the fans of a cult TV program not a million light years removed from "Star Trek." Anyone who has seen "Trekkies," the documentary about "Star Trek" fans, will recognize this world at once--a world of fanatics who take the show very seriously indeed, packing hotel ballrooms to screen classic episodes of the show and get autographs from its aging cast members.
