What's coming out this week
The title Body of Lies sounds like something you might catch on Cinemax on a late weekend night -- a movie starring Heather Locklear as the sultry defendant in a scandalous murder trial. It's a generic, clunky title. The movie isn't quite as disposable, but it's not exactly memorable, either.
Ernie Davis didn't carry a placard or attend sit-ins or register black voters in Alabama. He became a figure in the civil rights movement simply by running the football better than anyone else in college.
If the family-oriented fantasy City of Ember wasn't based on the 2003 novel by Jeanne Duprau, you'd swear it had been inspired by a theme-park attraction. Adapted by screenwriter Caroline Thompson (whose previous films include Edward Scissorhands and The Nightmare Before Christmas), the movie is an exceedingly slight tale whose entire second half consists primarily of special effects and wonderful set designs.
There's a well-defined line between wholesome and hokey, especially when depicting the life of one of the 20th century's respected religious figures.
In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, director David Zucker said distributor Vivendi Entertainment did not screen An American Carol in advance for reviews because 'those [who] don't like the politics will tend to label the film as `not funny.' '' The implication, of course, is that movie critics are a pitchfork-and-torch mob of raging leftist liberals who will tear down anything that opposes their personal ideologies.
Essentially a buddy movie in which the cops tote shotguns and travel on four legs instead of four wheels, Appaloosa takes the traditional notion of a lone lawman fighting injustice and turns it successfully on its head. Based on a spritely western by detective novelist Robert B. Parker, creator of the Spenser series, the film follows the exploits of Virgil Cole (Ed Harris) and Everett Hitch (Viggo Mortensen), gunslinging partners in a ''peacekeeping'' business who are hired by town officials to keep...
Early on in the documentary Religulous, stand-up comedian/political commentator Bill Maher states his thesis -- ''Religion is detrimental to humanity'' -- and then spends the rest of the movie hopping around the world, trying to prove it.
The heavy-handed allegory Blindness suggests that society teeters on the edge of chaos, and that not much is required to shove us into anarchy and lawlessness. In the case of this inexplicably tedious film, based on the bestselling novel by José Saramago, the event is a sudden, unexplained epidemic of vision loss that affects the population of an unnamed city.
Toby Young's memoir about climbing up -- and then sliding rapidly down -- the ladder at Vanity Fair makes an engaging transition to the screen, thanks to a lively adaptation that embellishes greatly on Young's story but preserves the central fish-out-of-water theme and biting commentary on celebrity obsession.
It's the first day of school and Greg Kinnear, as a college engineering professor, writes the word ''ethics'' on the blackboard for his students to ponder.
Ernie Davis didn't carry a placard or attend sit-ins or register black voters in Alabama. He became a figure in the civil rights movement simply by running the football better than anyone else in college.
If the family-oriented fantasy City of Ember wasn't based on the 2003 novel by Jeanne Duprau, you'd swear it had been inspired by a theme-park attraction. Adapted by screenwriter Caroline Thompson (whose previous films include Edward Scissorhands and The Nightmare Before Christmas), the movie is an exceedingly slight tale whose entire second half consists primarily of special effects and wonderful set designs.
The title Body of Lies sounds like something you might catch on Cinemax on a late weekend night -- a movie starring Heather Locklear as the sultry defendant in a scandalous murder trial. It's a generic, clunky title. The movie isn't quite as disposable, but it's not exactly memorable, either.
The two-disc Touch of Evil: 50th Anniversary Edition DVD (Universal Home Entertainment, $27) is nothing less than a revelation, regardless of whether you've seen the film. There are three versions of Orson Welles' famously troubled 1958 film noir included in the set: The 96-minute version that was released to theaters (where it flopped); a 109-minute ''preview'' version, discovered in 1972, that had since been assumed to be Welles' original cut; and a new 111-minute ''restored'' version, which had...
In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, director David Zucker said distributor Vivendi Entertainment did not screen An American Carol in advance for reviews because 'those [who] don't like the politics will tend to label the film as `not funny.' '' The implication, of course, is that movie critics are a pitchfork-and-torch mob of raging leftist liberals who will tear down anything that opposes their personal ideologies.
