A return to comic form after the woeful “Hollywood Ending.” The anxiety-ridden New York milieu, the Billie Holiday songs, the shrink jokes are familiar, but this time we see it all played out by a new generation. Jason Biggs takes the Woody role, as a guilt-ridden, pushover comedy writer besotted with a neurotic, withholding Christina Ricci, while Woody plays Biggs’s paranoid, half-mad mentor, who thinks the Upper East Side is crawling with Nazis. Relieved of his courting duties, Allen gives his funniest performance in ages.
The Rundown Directed by Peter Berg
The Rock makes his bid to be the new Arnold in this comic bone-cruncher. (Arnold himself has a two-second cameo.) He’s sent to Brazil to bring back rich kid Seann William Scott, and ends up fighting the private army of bad guy Christopher Walken while searching for ancient treasure. The twist is that the Rock refuses to use guns–until he’s really, really provoked. He and Scott work up some nice comic chemistry, but it’s the dependably warped Walken who steals the most scenes. The frenetically edited fight sequences will satisfy the blood lust of the target audience.
Bubba Ho-tep Directed by Don Coscarelli
Elvis Presley (Bruce Campbell) is alive and unwell in a nursing home in east Texas, where he teams up with an old codger (Ossie Davis) who thinks he’s JFK to battle soul-sucking Egyptian mummies. The always entertaining schlockmeister Coscarelli (“Phantasm,” “The Beastmaster”) spins this nutty premise–from John R. Lansdale’s short story–into a one-of- a-kind horror movie: hilarious, a little scary and strangely poignant. Campbell’s cranky, valiant, sad-sack King is a soulfully funny creation.
title: “Snap Judgement Movies” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-02” author: “Erma Rogers”
Directed by Billy Ray
Whether or not you know the story of Stephen Glass, the young writer at The New Republic exposed for fabricating stories, this account of his rise and fall is a fascinating tale of a journalistic con artist. Hayden Christensen, atoning for “Attack of the Clones,” is smarmily terrific as the unctuous Glass, and gifted chameleon Peter Sarsgaard, as the stiff, unpopular editor who exposed him, is a refreshing movie hero. Writer-director Ray has a no-fuss style that is quietly, thoroughly gripping.
Elephant
Directed by Gus Van Sant
Though it ends with an eruption of violence reminiscent of the Columbine massacre, Van Sant’s Cannes prize winner has no interest in explaining school violence. Instead, he offers a lyrical, elliptical portrait of a suburban high school (using nonprofessional actors) that captures the texture of teenage life with haunting verisimilitude. There’s much to argue with, but this unconventional, oddly beautiful film resonates in unexpected ways.
Elf
Directed by Jon Favreau
Towering over the elves he grew up with in Santa’s workshop, Buddy (Will Ferrell) has to come to grips with the fact that he’s really a human. So he sets off to New York to meet his real father, and discovers that a sugar-eating, insanely friendly man in a green elf suit and yellow tights who claims to be a personal friend of Santa Claus’s doesn’t exactly go over in Manhattan. Ferrell is a hoot. So is much of this witty holiday family entertainment, which, up until the end, when the “true spirit of Christmas” must be reaffirmed, happily favors slapstick over treacle.
title: “Snap Judgement Movies” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-25” author: “David Abramowski”
Directed by Bobby and Peter Farrelly
Further exploring their obsession with physical and mental extremities, the Farrelly brothers cast Matt Damon and Greg Kinnear as conjoined twins Bob and Walt Tenor, who give up their comfy lives as hamburger-joint chefs on Martha’s Vineyard to pursue Walt’s dream of acting. What first feels like thin skit material gets funnier and sweeter. Damon and Kinnear make a terrific team. But don’t expect knee-slapping gross-out humor. Behind the hit-or-miss gags, this is really a love story about two people who can’t live without each other.
Bad Santa
Directed by Terry Zwigoff
An antidote to forced holiday cheer, this scabrously funny misanthropic comedy is not for the whole family. A magnificently debauched Billy Bob Thornton stars as the world’s most inappropriate department-store Santa-and thief. “Bad Santa” never goes soft, even when a pudgy kid (Brett Kelly) becomes Thornton’s tag-along admirer. Zwigoff doesn’t hype up the gags, and his deliberately deadpan style gives even far-fetched jokes an edge of reality.
The Triplets of Belleville
Directed by Sylvain Chomet
The tone of this droll, thrillingly odd animated film isn’t easy to describe; neither is its loopy plot about a melancholy French cyclist named Champion who’s being trained for the Tour de France by his clubfooted grandma. Midrace, he’s kidnapped by French mafiosi (shaped like black rectangles)–and Granny and his dog Bruno take off in hot pursuit. Chomet’s delightful hand-drawn images evoke the ’50s Paris of Jacques Tati. A tad dark for little kids, this one-of-a-kind movie delivers 80 minutes of idiosyncratic inspiration.
title: “Snap Judgement Movies” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-14” author: “Helen Field”
The blind (and blond) swordsman Zatoichi is as legendary a character to Japanese audiences as James Bond is to us. The stone-faced writer-director-star “Beat” Takeshi, a legend himself, resurrects this icon with characteristically quirky zest. Complete with bloody swordplay, unexpected eruptions of slapstick, a cross-dressing geisha bent on revenge and the first 19th-century Japanese tap-dancing sequence I’ve ever seen, “Zatoichi” is a mix-and-match crowd-pleaser that shouldn’t add up, but delightfully does.
The Door in the Floor Directed by Tod Williams
Jeff Bridges is extraordinary as Ted Cole, a charming, womanizing author of children’s books whose family has collapsed after the death of two sons. His wife (Kim Basinger) has been hollowed out by grief. His 4-year-old daughter (Elle Fanning) obsesses over photos of her dead siblings. Based on part of John Irving’s “A Widow for One Year,” this hothouse tale of grief, sex and betrayal is told with a cool detachment that renders it commendably unsentimental–and slightly remote.
A Home at the End of the World Directed by Michael Mayer
For all its shortcomings–bad wigs and truncated transitions as it leaps from ’70s suburban Cleveland to N.Y.C.’s East Village and Woodstock in the ’80s–this unconventional love story between gay Jonathan (Dallas Roberts), bisexual Bobby (Colin Farrell) and free spirit Clare (Robin Wright Penn), who loves them both, packs an irresistible emotional punch. Guided by Michael Cunningham’s witty screenplay–he also wrote the hypnotizing novel of the same name–the actors celebrate a new notion of family.
title: “Snap Judgement Movies” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-16” author: “Michael Mandy”
Taking off from Christopher Priest’s novel, Nolan and his screenwriting brother, Jonathan, have whipped up a dark, tricky, tale of two rival magicians in turn-of-the-20th-century London. Hugh Jackman’s upper-class Angier and Christian Bale’s working-class Borden are obsessives who will go to any length to outshine the other. Part of the fun is learning the tricks of the illusionist’s trade. The ubiquitous Scarlett Johansson plays Jackman’s assistant, spy and lover, Michael Caine his designer of illusions. The beguiling Rebecca Hall is Bale’s wife, and a sly David Bowie plays the inventor Nikola Tesla. This cerebral thriller is a sleight-of-hand act itself: it proceeds by misdirection, and culminates in triple-whammy twists.
