By Richard von Busack
HOW DOES Pixar do what it does with such confidence—and such confidence unmarred by smugness? Most movie executives these days have almost no confidence that an audience of all ages can handle …

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by Richard von Busack
Stick around, past the politically creepy pre-title sequence—it’s like the fond wish of an Arizonan that the US/Mexican border was patrolled with a death ray. After that, Joe Carnahan’s The A-Team develops …

by Richard von Busack
Despite the use of Johnny Cash’s cover version of Neil Diamond’s best song, the film Solitary Man seems like a strange misnomer for Michael Douglas’s latest rogue-male movie. After a few years …

by Richard von Busack
MERMAID KITSCH must be thundered against, but there’s a surprising amount of grit in Neil Jordan’s Ondine. In his 16th film, Jordan is clearly working to please himself; the Irish locations are …

by Richard von Busack
When you can make a horror film with guts and elegance, light on blood and pop-ups, heavy on the king-hell disorientation that can only come from a solid premise rooted in primal …

by Richard von Busack
A CHILDREN’S MOVIE for adults, Micmacs by Jean-Pierre Jeunet concerns a group of derelict junkyard dwellers who go adventuring. They are led by Bazil (Dany Boon), who was unmanned by the loss …

by Richard von Busack
How to sum up the appeal of the Kuchar Brothers’ cinema? In some 40 years of strictly underground filmmaking, these two New York expatriates explored cinema in both parallel and separate directions, …

by Richard von Busack
WHAT BEGINS as a mess of good actors flailing for something to do devolves into a tangle of expatriate loungers keeping their secrets. The City of Your Final Destination concerns Omar (bland …

by Richard von Busack
HAVING LEFT the realm of common sense and cultural relevance years ago, the Sex and the City franchise staggers to its grave as a sequel of phenomenal gaucheness. Sex and the City …

by Richard von Busack
AS Sideshow Bob might have predicted: The chick flick’s bottomless chum bucket has claimed Vanessa Redgrave. Aspiring New Yorker writer Sophie (Amanda Seyfried) is involved with a way-too-preoccupied NYC chef (Gael García …