Due to the ever-changing nature of the movie biz, showtimes as they appear in ANY and ALL newspapers should always be double-checked with the theaters before setting off for a night at the flicks.
click here for movie theaters and showtimes
Opens Friday
BREAKFAST ON PLUTO
Cillian Murphy's pretty. We knew this, of course (
28 Days Later, Red Eye
)-but we mean
really
pretty. And that's a good thing when you're in a Neil Jordan film (
The Crying Game, Interview with a Vampire
), because you'll inevitably be wearing eyeliner. Jordan teams up again with novelist Pat McCabe (
The Butcher Boy
) to adapt and direct the heartwrenching story of Kitten Brady, born Patrick, who leaves small-town Ireland for London and a more exciting (and potentially dangerous) life as a transvestite cabaret singer in the swinging '60s and '70s. Jordan stalwarts Liam Neeson (
Michael Collins
) and Stephen Rea (
The End of the Affair
) costar; flawless period details and a spot-on performance from the ever-astounding Murphy make this an unmissable, if different, date movie.
CCA, R, 135 min.
GLORY ROAD
Even though the last basketball movie we really liked was
Hoop Dreams
, we had to admit we felt a rush of enthusiasm when during the trailer for
Glory Road
, Josh Lucas shouts, "You wanna shut them up-then win!" Apparently Mr. Lucas (
Wonderland, Empire Falls
) gained 35 pounds, the better to portray Texas Western coach (and eventual Hall of Famer) Don Haskings, who took his underdog team all the way to an NCAA title in 1966-with the first African-American starting lineup in history. It's director James Gartner's freshman effort, but he's got producer Jerry Bruckheimer (
Remember the Titans
, among others) in a jacket and necktie yelling at him from the sidelines.
DreamCatcher, UA North, PG, 106 min.
HOODWINKED
The new animation from Edwards brothers Cory and Todd (
Chillecothe
),
Hoodwinked
updates the fairy tale of Little Red Riding Hood with fast and furious gags, dollops of sarcasm and the vocal talents of Glenn Close, Anne Hathaway, James Belushi, David Ogden Stiers, Chazz Palminteri and Xzibit. As we grow more and more discriminating about our animation, though, the dicey art of smaller-studio features such as this one doesn't compare well with the elegant realization of Tim Burton or Nick Parks-or even Andrew Adamson.
UA South, PG, 80 min.
THE LAST HOLIDAY
Let no one say Queen Latifah's not brave; here she's essaying the role originally played by Sir Alec Guinness in the 1950 film of the same title (written by JB Priestley). That moody British comedy was hardly a hoot and a holler, but we imagine this version will be not only updated but rendered more upbeat. The gutsy hip-hop star (who you callin' a bitch?) plays Georgia Byrd, an upscale-cookware saleswoman who discovers she has but three weeks left to live. The lavish trip to Europe, fabulous makeover and flirtation with handsome foreigners (Giancarlo Esposito and Gérard Depardieu) follows-as well as a surprise visit from Sean (LL Cool J), the coworker on whom shy Georgia has always had an unspoken crush. Timothy Hutton and Jane Adams (the Screener's choice to play Emily Dickinson) costar. Will the Queen have a deathbed scene, or will all end happily? Only one way to know.
DreamCatcher, UA South, PG-13, 112 min.
TRISTAN & ISOLDE
It's beginning to acquire meaning, that innocent little ampersand; lately, when it appears in the title of a movie based on something considered more highbrow (an opera, an Arthurian romance) then you're probably in for a soundtrack featuring Radiohead and Garbage. The makers of
T&I
also surely encountered a not-unusual obstacle in filming tragic medieval romances-that if you cast leads youthful enough to be historically accurate and, more importantly to snare your target demographic (in this case, James Franco and Sophia Myles), you tend to get leads who…can't act. Our two star-crossed lovers, an orphaned knight and the very, very married future Queen of England, seem more enervated than destroyed by their passion; fortunately Rufus Sewall (somewhat young himself to be the cuckolded King Mark) looks to pick up the pace a bit by raving and raging, but he can't carry the film alone. If it's a total bust, there's always the creepily contemporized, Jean-Cocteau-penned version,
L'Éternel retour
, filmed in 1943 German-occupied France.
UA North, PG-13, 140 min.
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Short Runs
BE HERE TO LOVE ME
If you're already a fan of the late Texas guitarist Townes Van Zandt, you've probably been looking forward to Margaret Brown's documentary for months now. If, on the other hand, you've never heard of him, it doesn't actually matter, because the mix of home footage, live performances and interviews with his peers, friends and admirers (Emmylou Harris, Steve Earle, Kris Kristofferson, Willie Nelson and Bob Dylan, to name only a few) will suck you into the life of a songwriter whose personal misery contrasted sharply with his uniquely commanding ability to put into words and music all the emotions that the rest of us feel but often can't articulate.
CCA, NR, 99 min.
BURNING MAN: BEYOND BLACK ROCK
One of the hits at December's film festival, this is the documentary for all of us intrigued by the unique city of 30,000 created for seven days every summer in the Black Rock Desert-but not quite intrigued enough to brave the sun damage, or the transition into full-bore "gift community" culture. The filmmakers assiduously tracked Burning Man folk and their doings for a solid 18 months, resulting in a most thorough documentary of the organization.
Santa Fe Film Center, NR, 105 min.
CHRISTMAS IN THE CLOUDS
It's not exactly the first Native American romantic comedy (we'll always have
Dance Me Outside
), but it may be the first one headlining Native yuppie characters-and it's arguably the funniest, with a dark, slyly intelligent and screamingly funny sense of the ludicrous. So skip the super-silly Anglo post-holiday romance fare and join writer-director Kate Montgomery's cast at a struggling Indian-owned ski resort where M Emmet Walsh plays a rumpled alcoholic Anglo hotel reviewer, Tim Vahle is stressed-out manager Ray Clouds on Fire, Mariana Tosca is gorgeous Tina Little Hawk (whom everyone
thinks
is the hotel critic) and standbys Rita Coolidge, Lois Red Elk, Wes Studi (as a bingo caller), Shirley Cheechoo and Heather Rae add to the droll ensemble-though Graham Greene steals the show as usual, playing Earl, the hotel chef who's recently become…an evangelical vegetarian.
CCA, PG, 96 min.
EDGAR CAYCE: THE BEAUTIFUL DREAMER
Another film festival fave, this curiously engrossing documentary reveals the life story underlying the legend of "the Sleeping Prophet," a clairvoyant who gave over 14,000 readings during his lifetime-and allegedly healed thousands of incurable illnesses, making him perhaps the first medical intuitive on record. It's not the most beautifully filmed doc you'll ever see, but the subject is so eerily fascinating and filmmaker Darrah Meeley's research so thorough that you soon forget to notice.
Santa Fe Film Center, NR, 62 min.
ELIAS RIVERA: THROUGH THE EYES OF A MASTER
Join the Santa Fe painter in his studio for an intimate look at his process and his private life. Friends and admirers such as art dealer Dennis Yares, actor Gene Hackman and fellow painter (and wife) Susan Contretas offer their insights into what makes Rivera tick-but the primary star of the show is the man in his studio, concentrating on nothing but paint, canvas and light.
Santa Fe Film Center, NR, 60 min.
LAST OF THE SPANISH MUSTANGS
Former TV news anchor turned director Len Johnson has created one of those documentaries which, after you've seen it, compels you actually to do something about what you've seen. Darned inconvenient, but don't say you haven't been forewarned. Very few wild horses still run freely in North America, mostly on public lands; the number is estimated to be fewer than 30,000, as compared to about 2 million in the 19th century. Johnson not only gets to know one Southwestern herd intimately, but uncovers horrific details of their slaughter, and horse slaughter in general-particularly in Texas, where horse meat is exported to Europe for human consumption. Contrasting the mustangs' beauty with their sickening mismanagement, Johnson's project promises to stir hearts and open eyes, even those deliberately screwed shut.
Santa Fe Film Center, NR, 88 min.
SAMURAI!
Boston Phoenix critic Henry Sheehan characterized the genre as follows: "When a man is surrounded inside a burning house by a dozen heavily armed warriors and it's the warriors who are in trouble, you know you're watching a samurai movie." (See
.)
CCA, runtimes and ratings vary
THE SQUID AND THE WHALE
Drenched in a subtly literary perfume, Noah Baumbach's debut invites comparison to the fiction of Philip Roth or Saul Bellow (whose paperbacks turn up repeatedly during the movie), though the more obvious antecedent is Wes Anderson's
The Royal Tenenbaums
. The film's opening-a combative tennis match in which Bernard (a scruffily bearded Jeff Daniels) and his older son Walt (Jesse Eisenberg) play doubles against wife and mother Joan (Laura Linney) and younger son Frank (Kevin Kline's progeny Owen)-promptly sets the stage for ferocious family conflict. Bernard, we perceive immediately, is the worst, an unwilling academic with a musty whiff of the démodé about him; yet Daniels gains our compassion by revealing the insecurities which underlie his sententiousness, as his wife's writing career outstrips his own. As the boys side with either father or mother, respectively, they recreate their parents' dysfunctionality (Walt adopts his father's more noxious mannerisms, while Frank develops precocious tastes for beer and autoeroticism) in a pair of painfully accurate performances. By the time he deploys the film's most dramatic, Godardesque shots, upping the emotional ante at the last minute, Baumbach has definitely earned the right to do so.
The Screen, R, 80 min.
STRAIGHT ACTING
If you were a gay Mormon missionary coming out of the closet, wouldn't your first foray be into the men's locker room with a camera? Well, maybe it's just us. At any rate, director Spencer Windes decided to become an openly gay athlete-and while he was at it, check out the rugby pitch, rodeo circuit and hockey rink. His discovery? All boys, straight or gay, love to play competitive games with long sticks and, um, balls. The doc shows with steamy 17-minute short
Night Swimming.
Santa Fe Film Center, NR, 58 min.
THE WORLD
Deceptively more micro than macrocosmic, The World in this case refers to a Beijing theme park, one of those awful places with built-to-scale copies of the Eiffel Tower, the Statue of Liberty and so forth. To tourists, its staff are happy, talented and fortunate-but behind the scenes is an atomized community of isolated, depressed workers trapped by the confines of The World (globalization, anyone?). When security guard Taisheng (Chen Taisheng) meets peachy Tao (Zhao Tao), a young dancer, they open the doors to possibility-if only they don't close precipitously. Expect
The World
to turn slowly, yet be strongly colored-not with the wild fauve of Zhang Yimou's high-femme
wuxia
fantasies, but tinted with young writer-director Zhang Ke Jia's duller, more ambiguous social realism, struggling to come to grips with a modernizing China from which no one can just fly away.
The Screen, NR, 143 min.
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Now Showing
BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN
Screenwriting team Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana (adapting Annie Proulx's story) have achieved the gape-worthy: They've actually succeeded in making something new under Hollywood's world-weary sun. While Westerns have always been homoerotic (almost a tautology of the genre), never has
Lonesome Dove
merged so honestly and so meltingly with, say,
Maurice
. Add the lyrical direction of Ang Lee and you get an old-fashioned big-screen romance, which only incidentally happens to be between two men. Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) and Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger, who recalls Brando or Dean in his inarticulate fluency) meet one summer when they pair up to watch a herd of sheep; Jack is a rodeo charmer, as playful and sensual as Ennis is laconic and introverted. Soon both men find themselves struggling to ignore the obvious; without putting too fine a point on it, they fall in love. Yet even this charmed state of affairs can't continue indefinitely; the agonizing repercussions of one's fearful renunciation of the other reverberate through the remainder of the film, a tragic denial of self. It's heartbreaking, it's beautifully filmed and it's making money; ride 'em, cowboys.
UA DeVargas, R, 134 min.
CASANOVA
See SFR's
.
UA North, R, 108 min.
CHEAPER BY THE DOZEN 2
No, no,
no
: It doesn't mean they have 24 kids now. It means that the Bakers (Bonnie Hunt and Steve Martin, reprising their 2003 roles) and their near-score of progeny head for Lake Winnetka for a summer cabin and some quality family time, but who should they encounter but Dad's archenemy Jimmy Murtaugh (Eugene Levy), his new trophy wife (Carmen Electra), and their eight offspring, staying across the lake from them. As odd as it might seem to take in a Labor Day flick on the darkest nights of the year, this installment's actually a mild improvement over the last one (no comment as to the difficulty of such an achievement), so slap on the sunscreen and bug spray and enjoy.
DreamCatcher, UA South, PG, 100 min.
THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA: THE LION, THE WITCH AND THE WARDROBE
Amidst the folderol lies a film worth watching if you can manage to ignore the tug-of-war over its alleged religious content; its highlight is without a doubt Tilda Swinton in the role she was destined to inhabit from birth: that of the White Queen. Alas, that's about it in an otherwise run-of-the-mill big-budget Disney kiddie-trap (though Georgie Henley as Lucy is unsettlingly good); Aslan's being voiced by Liam Neeson renders him cuddly rather than bloodcurdling, and the battle scenes, while large and bustling, don't give you the sense of impossible odds and insanely high stakes they did in the
LOTR
trilogy. A good dose of Sir Ian or even Viggo would have gone a long way-the actors here just aren't of the same caliber, and when you combine that with some frankly silly direction, this story of four British schoolchildren who accidentally wander into a magical land at war seems neither enchanting nor believable.
DreamCatcher, UA DeVargas, UA South, PG, 140 min.
THE FAMILY STONE
When eldest son Everett Stone (Dermot Mulroney) brings his uptight girlfriend Meredith (Sarah Jessica Parker) home for the holidays, with unearthly glee they go for the jugular (in particular Diane Keaton as matriarch Sybil and breakout starlet Rachel McAdams as deliciously malicious Amy), while dad Craig T Nelson and laid-back brother Luke Wilson (who seems to be playing Owen) offer only feeble remonstration. Everett's secret is that he's planning to propose to Meredith; the Stone clan's secret is that they think Everett and Meredith a terrible match; Sybil's secret remains hers for most of the film, but its eventual disclosure changes everything in its wake. Can Luke get the wooden Meredith to loosen up? Can Everett get the rebar out of his rear long enough to realize how pretty Meredith's sister (Claire Danes) is? In the fine tradition of holiday hanky-wavers, there'll be guffaws and muffled sobs en route to resolution;
The Family Stone
's hardly great art, but genial winter entertainment.
Jean Cocteau, UA South, PG-13, 102 min.
FUN WITH DICK AND JANE
It's not that we haven't been yearning for a long time for Teá Leoni (also Mrs. David Duchovny) to work more. It's just that this wasn't exactly what we had in mind…we were thinking Ralph Fiennes, or maybe Marton Csokas, not Jim Carrey in face-contorting, I'm-so-gosh-darn-
funny
mode. But as ever, Hollywood has failed to consult us on matters of good taste in casting, so here she is opposite him in this unfunny remake of the 1977 George Segal/Jane Fonda caper about a married couple who must turn to a life of crime to pay the bills, because they apparently have no credit rating.
DreamCatcher, UA North, UA South PG-13, 90 min.
GRANDMA'S BOY
Adam Sandler's behind all this, but he's smart enough not to appear in it. Put as succinctly as possible, a video-game tester (Allen Covert, veteran of other Sandler projectiles) must move in with his grandmother and her two elderly roommates, for reasons of an impecuniosity related to Filipino sex workers. Enjoy, enjoy.
UA South, R, 94 min.
HOSTEL
To be honest, scary movies tend to propel the Screener into days-long episodes of irrational skittishness, so much so that we're frightened to wipe the steam off the bathroom mirror (after
The Sixth Sense
it was weeks before we stopped seeing dead people). Fortunately for those who require a review of
Hostel
(currently the #1 film in the US), we can attest that it's not scary so much as it is seriously nauseating. Like last year's
Saw II
and
The Devil's Rejects,
it's a fine example of the latest horror subgenre: the torture film. The twist this time is that the torturees are college-boy Eurotrippers so sexist and idiotic that you don't feel quite as morally repelled as you might otherwise when the time for their dismemberment arrives. Its director, Tarentino protégé Eli Roth, maintains there's some slyly political value in
Hostel'
s underpinnings, to which we reply flatly: Who the heck cares?
DreamCatcher, UA North, R, 95 min.
KING KONG
Contrary to popular belief, there is such a thing as "too much of a good thing." Case in point: director Peter Jackson's remake of the 1933 classic, clocking in at over three hours. Jack Black stars as Carl Denham, a filmmaker looking to salvage the ruins of his latest picture by trekking to legendary Skull Island with Ann Darrow (Naomi Watts), a struggling young actress and Jack Driscoll (Adrien Brody), an up-and-coming playwright-culminating with the capture of the big hairy guy (and leading, of course, to an unfortunate incident involving a skyscraper). Jackson never relents in his nonstop thrill-ride approach to storytelling.
Kong
should be seen on the big screen; but if you arrive an hour late and leave 20 minutes early, you won't see a good movie, you'll see an excellent one.
DreamCatcher, UA DeVargas, UA North, PG-13, 187 min.
MEMOIRS OF A GEISHA
We feel about
Memoirs
the way we felt about
The Last Samurai
(not Helen DeWitt's profligate first novel, but the cinematic cheap shot starring Ken Watanabe-and, oh yeah, Tom Cruise): It's pretty, it has three of the world's most beautiful actresses in it (
Raise the Red Lantern
's Gong Li, Michelle Yeoh-who has a sexy, elegant dignity not seen on screen since Ingrid Bergman-and feisty Zhang Ziyi, always good for a firecracker or two) and it stars Ken Watanabe, too. Unfortunately, it's also an unadulterated bore; when you hear Zhang's voiceover: "Mine is a story that should never have been told"-well, let's just say it begs the question.
UA DeVargas, PG-13, 145 min.
MUNICH
See SFR's
.
UA DeVargas, R, 164 min.
THE PRODUCERS
Once there was a stage musical which became a film; it then became a musical again, but a different one-and now that musical is a film once more. If you think that Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick are funny as Bialystock and Bloom, then you clearly wouldn't know Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder if they auditioned you for the role of Hitler. Mel Brooks' pungent satire (pillorying both unscrupulous showbiz and the ignorant enthusiasms of upper-class art consumers) seems irretrievably lost beneath the bajillions of dollars which have traded hands, and not even some inspired casting (leggy Uma Thurman as dancing Swedish marvel Ulla and Will Ferrell as Nazi playwright Franz Leibkind) can do much to hold up the resultant unwieldy chimera, which starts to seem like an endless loud party downstairs at 2 in the morning. Despite frequent frenetic showstoppers, the show just goes on…and on…and on.
UA DeVargas, PG-13, 134 min.
RUMOR HAS IT
We'd be so happy if we could tell you what a delight this little film is; that Jennifer Aniston's funny and adorable, Mark Ruffalo and Kevin Costner are completely believable as her swains, that there's nothing annoying about her family's cavalier attitude toward their own class status (Pasadena, and very, very,
very
rich) and that the supporting roles for Mena Suvari, Richard Jenkins and Shirley MacLaine are rich and well-developed. But if we said this to you, our nose would grow even longer than it is already. This is an abysmal movie, out of which we watched audience members walk in small, determined groups; the script tries, from time to time, in a sprightly, cheerfully insistent way to accomplish various things, but then it subsides, defeated by its own bewilderment and clumsiness. It's all made worse by the fact that this family is supposed to be the family on which the Robinsons are based in
The Graduate
; but inviting comparison to a much better film isn't actually a very smart move, leading viewers to the obvious conclusion.
DreamCatcher, UA South, PG-13, 96 min.
SYRIANA
In writer-director Stephen Gaghan's complex, multilayered political thriller, oil is the driving force behind an intricate web of deception, murder and corruption. Using an interwoven story structure similar to that of his Oscar-winning
Traffic
screenplay, Gaghan offers a conspiracy-minded view of the interconnected world of oil sales, strife in the Middle East and duplicitous business endeavors. With an ensemble featuring George Clooney as a burnt-out CIA operative, Matt Damon as an idealistic derivatives trader, brilliant work from Tim Blake Nelson, Will Hurt and Jeffrey Wright, and perhaps most remarkably a star-making performance from Alexander Siddig as a liberal, Western-thinking Saudi prince,
Syriana
is a bold-albeit left-leaning-work not afraid to spark discussion. Weaving an intricate tapestry of overlapping story and character arcs, Gaghan attempts to explain what is going on in the world today, as oil reserves quickly diminish and no one wants to be left in the dark, literally; the result is a smart thriller that rebukes the clichés and trappings normally associated with its genre.
UA North, R, 126 min.
NOTHING TRIVIAL ABOUT IT
We hereby declare the winners of our Reader-Devised Quiz to be…the readers who devised the quiz. No one could identify the "absurdly anachronistic set dressing marring the Queen Elizabeth-throne-room scene in
Orlando
"-not even the Screener, who hasn't seen it since it first came out; we were, however, able to assert that it's Buckaroo Banzai (of
The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension
) who says, "Character is what you are in the dark," and "Wherever you go, there you are" (though perhaps Yogi Berra also stated the latter). Two DVDs apiece to
Rand B Lee
and
David Zeoli,
for putting up with all this. For the rest of you: Who were director William Wyler's original casting choices for his 1961 remake of
The Children's Hour
, which starred Audrey Hepburn and an unforgettable Shirley MacLaine? Send your answers to
.
click here for movie theaters and showtimes
Due to the ever-changing nature of the movie biz, showtimes as they appear in ANY and ALL newspapers should always be double-checked with the theaters before setting off for a night at the flicks.
