The Passion Of The Christ
After all the controversy and rigorous debate has subsided, Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ will remain a force to be reckoned with.
After all the controversy and rigorous debate has subsided, Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ will remain a force to be reckoned with.
With Sideways, Paul Giamatti (American Splendor, Storytelling) has become an unlikely but engaging romantic lead. Struggling novelist and wine connoisseur Miles (Giamatti) takes his best friend Jack (Thomas Haden Church, Wings) on a wine-tasting tour of California vineyards for a kind of extended bachelor party.
How's this for impressive trivia: Dodgeball faced off against The Terminal in opening-weekend competition, and 29-year-old writer-director Rawson Marshall Thurber aced Steven Spielberg by a score of $30 to $18.7 in box-office millions.
If you spliced Charles Addams, Dr. Seuss, Charles Dickens, Edward Gorey, and Roald Dahl into a Tim Burtonesque landscape, you'd surely come up with something like Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events. Many critics (in mostly mixed reviews) wondered why Burton didn't direct this comically morbid adaptation of the first three books in the popular series by Daniel Handler (a.k.a.
Most thrillers can be judged on their plots, but with The Clearing the plot is only a frame for three excellent performances. The story is driven by the kidnapping of a retired businessman (Robert Redford) by a former disgruntled employee (Willem Dafoe, Shadow of the Vampire). But while half of the movie follows these two men as they wend their way towards a cabin in the woods, the other half observes the businessman's wife (Helen Mirren, the Prime Suspect series) as she copes with both the kidnapping and the secrets it accidentally reveals.
Jude Law's Alfie, much like Michael Caine's Alfie in the 1966 original, is what you'd call an unrepentant womanizer. He beds 'em but never weds 'em, and New York provides ample opportunity to continue the process--until reality slaps him in the face. Because Jude Law is, well, Jude Law, you can see why he gets away with it as long as he does, and the actor also pulls off the usually awkward trick of narrating directly to the camera. Neither his Alfie, however, nor director Charles Shyer's remake emerges completely without scratches.
Jamie Foxx's uncannily accurate performance isn't the only good thing about Ray. Riding high on a wave of Oscar buzz, Foxx proved himself worthy of all the hype by portraying blind R&B legend Ray Charles in a warts-and-all performance that Charles approved shortly before his death in June 2004.
Like its predecessor Ocean's Eleven, Ocean's Twelve is a piffle of a caper, a preposterous plot given juice and vitality by a combination of movie star glamour and the exuberant filmmaking skill of director Steven Soderbergh (Out of Sight, The Limey).
When you consider that old-fashioned tearjerkers are an endangered species in Hollywood, a movie like The Notebook can be embraced without apology. Yes, it's syrupy sweet and clogged with cliches, and one can only marvel at the irony of Nick Cassavetes directing a weeper that his late father John--whose own films were devoid of saccharine sentiment--would have sneered at.
From Jerry Bruckheimer, producer of Pirates of the Caribbean and Jon Turtletaub, director of Phenomenon, comes National Treasure. It's the thrilling, edge-of-your-seat adventure starring Academy Award winner Nicolas Cageias Benjamin Franklin Gates. Ever since he was a boy, Gates has been obsessed with finding the legendary Knights Templar Treasure, the greatest fortune known to man. As Gates tries to find and decipher ancient riddles that will lead him to it, he's dogged by a ruthless enemy (Sean Bean, The Lord of the Rings trilogy) who wants the riches for himself.
