Seabiscuit The story of champion racehorse Seabiscuit and the three men who shaped his destiny sounds like the worst sort of Hollywood hokum. Tragedies affect all of the characters and seem designed to pull at our heartstrings. Yet the story behind the Laura Hillenbrand best-seller and this fine adaptation by director Gary Ross is true. […]
Film
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Movies
Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over While large-scale IMAX productions have achieved stunning realism, writer and director Robert Rodriguez’s latest film–the third following the childhood adventures of Juni and Carmen Cortez–succeeds with quaint 3-D cardboard glasses. Floating bulls-eyes loom before us. Frogs on pogo sticks bounce forward. Nuts and bolts fly off disintegrating machines. Grasping hands […]
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The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen “I’m waiting to be impressed,” says Allan Quatermain (Sean Connery) when confronted with the concept of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. And, frankly, so was I after the negative buzz about the project, including a notorious on-set physical confrontation between Connery and director Stephen Norrington. This cross between “Classics Illustrated” […]
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Legally Blonde 2: Red, White & Blonde If a comedy falls in a theater and nobody laughs, is it still a comedy? Legally Blonde 2: Red, White & Blonde–the sequel to the surprise 2001 hit starring Reese Witherspoon as a dumb blonde who gets into Harvard Law School–sure looks like a comedy. It contains bright, […]
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Terminator 3:Rise of the Machines Yes, Ah-nold is back as the Terminator. This third time around, Schwarzenegger is a bit more willing to make fun of his character, which has become an indisputable icon of our pop culture. The irony is aided by director Jonathan Mostow’s breezy pacing, which plays up the laughs. In Terminator […]
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About Schmidt Warren Schmidt (Jack Nicholson) is dead inside. He’s been married 42 years and has worked for about as long at the Woodman of the World Insurance Company. At a retirement dinner thrown in his honor, he accepts his colleague’s tributes as if they were death sentences but endures them all, as he has […]
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If the mafia doesn’t exist. . .
The gangster film has made a resounding comeback this year with Road to Perdition and Martin Scorsese’s long-awaited Gangs of New York. The genre began in the silent era, but it made its first big splash in the early 1930s with the releases of Public Enemy, Little Caesar, and Scarface. All three are still highly […]
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Far From Heaven Much has been made of Todd Haynes’ Far From Heaven, his homage to the films of 1950s director Douglas Sirk. Coming to prominence in 1954 with Magnificent Obsession and followed by All That Heaven Allows and Written on the Wind, Sirk dared to peek beneath the veneer of the American Dream, exposing […]
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Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle I tried. I really tried to get into the world of Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle, a place were the laws of physics don’t apply and hot babes survive massive car crashes and explosions without a hair out of place. I did my best to believe director McG is fashioning a new […]
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Alex and Emma After director Rob Reiner bombed with his last two films–1996’s Ghosts of Mississippi and 1999’s The Story of Us–he returns to familiar territory with Alex and Emma, a delightful romantic comedy that borrows heavily from two of his biggest hits, The Princess Bride and When Harry Met Sally. The premise is more […]
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Chicago Using the classic musical form as a foundation and throwing in just a dose of MTV razzle dazzle, Rob Marshall’s Chicago is the musical Moulin Rouge wanted to be. Chicago shows far more restraint than Baz Luhrmann’s overrated exercise in excess by eschewing MoulinRouge’s seizure-inducing editing. Instead, Marshall favors sharply choreographed dance numbers executed […]
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Movie Review
2 Fast 2 Furious A more apt title for Universal’s sequel to its surprise 2001 hit The Fast and the Furious, would be 2 Stupid 2 Boring. Director John Singleton and his screenwriters jettisoned everything that was interesting and exciting about the original, replacing them with, well, nothing really. Perhaps Singleton believes in doing things […]
