(Originally posted on 12/16/03) After the visually inventive but dreary Sleepy Hollow and the across-the-board awful Planet of the Apes, Tim Burton returns to more familiar quirky territory with Big Fish, an ebullient tall tale about the magic of imagination and the power of myth. Edward Bloom (Albert Finney in the present; Ewan McGregor in…

(Originally posted on 12/15/03) Following on the heels of his existential wilderness tour Gerry, Gus Van Sant’s Elephant brings us inside an anonymous Middle America high school in the morning hours before a Columbine-esque massacre. The result is an hour and a half tease in which the audience is asked to dutifully wait for the…

(Originally posted on 11/30/03) As a student who’s spent the last three months learning about journalistic ethics at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, I had a special interest in catching Shattered Glass, the story of disgraced writer Stephen Glass. In 1998, Glass, a suave, imminently personable star reporter for The New Republic (“The in-flight…

(Originally posted on 11/30/03) Terry Zwigoff’s Bad Santa is an uproarious all-out assault on propriety. Billy Bob Thornton plays Willie, a crass, profane drunken crook who, with his midget sidekick Marcus (Tony Cox), spends each Christmas working as a department store Kris Kringle with the aim of robbing his place of employment. As Marcus aptly…

(Originally posted 11/21/03) Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World desperately wants to be the kind of swashbuckling adventure that Errol Flynn and Burt Lancaster (in Robert Siodmak’s vastly undervalued The Crimson Pirate) used to make. Unfortunately, it doesn’t quite make the grade, but that’s not to say it’s a bad film. For…

(Originally posted 11/13/03) I finally saw The Matrix Revolutions and, despite my total lack of interest, thought it was better than this past summer’s The Matrix Reloaded. Of course, since I thought Reloaded was an underwhelming muddle of philosophical mumbo jumbo and lifeless CGI nonsense, that’s hardly high praise. What’s so surprising about this final…

(Originally posted 11/10/03) Despite feeling obligated to see The Matrix Revolutions, I went with my gut this past weekend and saw Elf instead. Smart move. While it can’t fully overcome its hokey plot formula — a mixture of The Jerk and every other SNL-style comedy of the past ten years, in which a bumbling man-child…