Will Farrell followed up his star-making vehicle Elf, which matched his fine-tuned comic obliviousness to a sweet sincerity, with a more arrogant variation on the same character: Ron Burgundy, a macho, narcissistic news anchor from the 1970s.
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.
David Lean focused all his talent as an epic-maker on Boris Pasternak's sweeping novel about a doctor-poet in revolutionary Russia. The results may sometimes veer toward soap opera, especially with the screen frequently filled with adoring close-ups of Omar Sharif and Julie Christie, but Lean's gift for cramming the screen with spectacle is not to be denied. The streets of Moscow, the snowy steppes of Russia, the house in the country taken over by ice; these are re-created with Lean's unerring sense of grandness.
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.
Larry McMurtry's novel becomes a winning film as directed by James L. Brooks (As Good As It Gets), with Shirley MacLaine and Debra Winger playing a combative mother and daughter who see each other through various ups and downs in love and loss, and most especially through a terminal illness endured by Winger's character. Jack Nicholson deservedly won an Oscar for his supporting role as a free-spirited astronaut who backs away from a romance with MacLaine and then returns in the clutch.
Charged with pulse-pounding suspense, ingenious special effects from Academy Award winner Richard Edlund and a first-rate cast including Oscar winner Ben Kingsley, Michael Madsen, Alfred Molina, Forest Whitaker, Marg Helgenberger and Natasha Henstridge, Species is an adrenaline-charged thrill-ride you'll never forget!
