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Twenty-Two-Gun Salute - By Donald Levit

Early success is routinely reckoned as a cause of the drying up and demise of American artists. However, fame -- with not all that much fortune -- isn�t posited as the downfall of the New Journalist subject of Alex Gibney�s Gonzo: The Life and Work of Hunter S. Thompson. While the...

Will the Real Painter Please Stand Up? - By Joanne Ross

Four year-old Marla Olmstead is an artistic genius. Or is she? In My Kid Could Paint That, director Amir Bar-Lev profiles four-year old Marla Olmstead, an amazingly talented and prolific little girl whose abstract paintings caused a stir in the art world. A native of B...

The Life of Pie - By Adam Hakari

I've hardly ever seen a film take off so marvelously and crash so painfully as My Blueberry Nights. When the movie begins, it seems there's no way it can fail. It's packed with an exquisite cast, a jazzy score, and a boozy, dreamlike atmosphere that...

Right Here in River City - By Donald Levit

Coincident with the FBI Innocence Lost National Initiative crackdown, director-producer David Schisgal�s non-intrusive verit� Very Young Girls records the nitty-gritty of child prostitution, not in the Third World of, for example, Cambodia�s ...

The Ties That Bind - By Adam Hakari
Filmmaker Tyler Perry always begins his movies with the best of intentions. He presents tales of good, honest, hard-working people trying to overcome adversity in an unforgiving world. But all to often he weighs down his stories with one-dimensional characters, heavy-handed...

Half-Cocked - By Jeffrey Chen
Hancock starts off amusing enough, basically sending off Will Smith, as the titular character, in angry trash-talking mode and making it charismatic and empathetic, as only Smith can. He plays a superhero who isn't good at being a superhero -- not that he lacks a moral compass,...

Smother Love - By Joanne Ross
Famous film villain Norman Bates said, �A boy's best friend is his mother.� Hitchcock�s Psycho showed us how tragically that relationship turned out for both Norman and Mrs. Bates. Savage Grace depicts another such relationship ending in tragedy -- but in...

Double Trouble - By Adam Hakari
I'm beginning to consider Kiyoshi Kurosawa the most "artsy" of today's hottest Japanese horror directors. Instead of going for the "long-haired ghost" routine, Kurosawa seems to prefer packing his chillers with a much darker and more intimate atmosphere of...

Trash and Treasure - By Betty Jo Tucker
One person�s trash is another person�s treasure, so the old saying goes. In WALL�E, the same holds true for robots. This Pixar animated movie depicts a dismal time in the future of our home planet. But it does so with humor and heart. After...

A Real Knockout - By Adam Hakari
All too often, sports films exist simply for the sake of existing, hoping to squeeze a few bucks out of the four people left in the world who haven't seen one of these predictable movies in the last ten years. The low-budget comedy The Hammer may not be particularly...