Author: Rob Blackwelder Page 2
I ? Huckabees
The one philosophy behind the existential screwball comedy "I ? Huckabees" (pronounce the ? as "heart") is that there is no one philosophy. A satire of spiritual gurus, self-help and other psychological gimmickry, it makes...
Movie Review posted on 8th March 2005
The Bourne Supremacy
Staying 100-percent true to the surprising, cerebral, cliché- and catch-phrase-eschewing spirit of 2002's "The Bourne Identity," screenwriter Tony Gilroy (returning from the original) and director Paul Greengrass have put together a breathless sequel with tense...
Movie Review posted on 8th March 2005
The Alamo
If you want to remember the Alamo, the latest feature film version of the Texas fort's famous last stand may not be much help.A beautifully produced but relatively bloodless (literally and figuratively) Hollywood rendering of...
Movie Review posted on 8th March 2005
King Arthur
According to the studio advertising campaign, the 2004 mega-budget version of "King Arthur" is "the untold true story that inspired the legend" -- you know, the factual version in which Arthur is a brooding bore,...
Movie Review posted on 8th March 2005
Frida
Most movies about the lives of famous artists never provide a true sense of what drove the person's creativity. Even in a strongly acted, strongly directed biopic like 2000's "Pollock," for example, the closest it...
Movie Review posted on 8th March 2005
A Walk On The Moon
Somehow "A Walk On the Moon," which takes place at a working-classJewish resort in upstate New York during the summer of 1969, manages tovisit every iconic event of that characteristic season which defined ageneration without...
Movie Review posted on 8th March 2005
Wild Wild West
It is readily apparent that Will Smith, Kevin Kline and Kenneth Branagh had a ball on the set of "Wild Wild West."Smith -- playing gun-slinging government agent Jim West -- looks so cool in his...
Movie Review posted on 8th March 2005
Star Wars: Episode II - Attack Of The Clones
The climactic lightsaber duel in "Star Wars: Episode II -- Attack of the Clones" has to be seen to be believed. It puts the awesome Darth Maul/Obi-Wan fight in "The Phantom Menace" to shame, and...
Movie Review posted on 8th March 2005
Thir13en Ghosts
A genuinely spectacular waste of money -- and about as mind-numbing as you'd expect from a movie which brags in ads that its "R" rating is for violence, gore and nudity -- "Thirteen Ghosts" has...
Movie Review posted on 8th March 2005
40 Days & 40 Nights
One of the more gratifying feelings a movie critic can have is the feeling of going into a picture expecting tiresome clichés of an overplayed genre, only to discover delightfully surprising freshness and soul where...
Movie Review posted on 8th March 2005
Kill Bill: Volume 1
In the wake of "Reservoir Dogs," "Pulp Fiction" and "Jackie Brown," film buffs have come to expect intrepid sub-Hollywood scavenger Quentin Tarantino to bowl us over with ingenious, amped-up, style-blending B-movie off-shoots made with a...
Movie Review posted on 8th March 2005
The Perfect Storm
Somewhere inside "The Perfect Storm" there's a near-perfect movie drowning under gale-force swells of romanticized sea-faring melodrama.Here's a stomach-in-knots true story about the rugged crew a swordfishing boat caught in the biggest sea storm in...
Movie Review posted on 8th March 2005
Romeo Must Die
Most freely adapted from Shakespeare, "Romeo Must Die" is a pounding-adrenaline martial arts action flick with a rival gang romance subplot that seems to have lifted more from "Macbeth" than "Romeo and Juliet" -- mainly...
Movie Review posted on 8th March 2005
The Nutty Professor II: The Klumps
How many times are we going to have to see some former stand-up comedian dressed in rubber fat lady suit, beating to death saggy boob jokes before people realize this kind of comedy just isn't...
Movie Review posted on 8th March 2005
Lake Placid
"Lake Placid" is a sub-standard monster movie with such a greatcast of enjoyable stars you won't even care that it's bad. Star number one: Bridget Fonda, who plays a lab jockeypaleontologist, an indoor kind of...
Movie Review posted on 8th March 2005
The Haunted Mansion
As mechanical as an old Disneyland automaton, "The Haunted Mansion" is the third movie in a year from the Mouse House studio based on one of its own theme park rides -- and while it's...
Movie Review posted on 8th March 2005
The Rules Of Attraction
Like an episode of MTV's barely-legal late-night dorm life soap "Undressed," with 20 times the creativity but without any more substance, "The Rules of Attraction" is a stylish, glib, endemically energetic diversion that's indulgently entertaining...
Movie Review posted on 8th March 2005
Blow Dry
"Blow Dry" is a leaden British dramedy about an estranged family of hairdressers reconciling when a big coiffeur competition comes to their small town. Like "The Big Tease" -- a similarly themed English mockumentary that...
Movie Review posted on 8th March 2005
What Women Want
You know how in testosterone-charged action movies an explosion will be shown over and over again in slow motion, and from four or five different angles? The ultimate sign of a guy movie, right?Well, in...
Movie Review posted on 8th March 2005
Crocodile Dundee In L.A.
Somebody at Paramount Pictures must have owed Paul Hogan a humongous favor to green-light "Crocodile Dundee in Los Angeles." Before even seeing the movie, I could have told you it's 15 years too late for...
Movie Review posted on 8th March 2005
The Closet (Le Placard)
Although Francis Veber's "The Closet" is billed as a comedy, it's not clear at first what sense of humor it might have. The prolific French director has been known to make screwball comedies ("Le jouet"),...
Movie Review posted on 8th March 2005
American Beauty
Every time I see a new Kevin Spacey movie, I expect the world from him, and every time he delivers the galaxy.Arguably the greatest actor currently working in motion pictures, he is capable of putting...
Movie Review posted on 8th March 2005
Return To Me
Taken out of context, the plot of "Return To Me" sounds like a really cheesy gimmick for a movie romance.David Duchovny plays a man whose beautiful, adoring wife (Joley Richardson) dies in a car crash....
Movie Review posted on 8th March 2005
October Sky
Although "October Sky" is a film with no surprises from its soundtrack of '50s rock 'n' roll standards to its triumph over adversity themes, this teen-years biography of a NASA scientist who got his start...
Movie Review posted on 8th March 2005
The Matrix Reloaded
Here's your review of "The Matrix Reloaded" in a nutshell: One incredibly cool, gravity-defying, CGI-aided, swirling-camera kung-fu melee; one jaw-dropping, 100-mph, against-traffic freeway chase; and way, way too much long-winded, expository, circular, self-important, pseudo-philosophical yappity-yappity-yap.Writing-directing...
Movie Review posted on 8th March 2005
Songcatcher
Wonderfully chameleonic actress Janet McTeer ("The King Is Alive," "Tumbleweeds") gives another of her distinctive and deeply immersed performances in "Songcatcher" as a priggish 1900s music scholar.A terse, obstinate, overeducated woman who is deeply resentful...
Movie Review posted on 8th March 2005
The Chronicles Of Riddick
Writer-director David Twohy creates an uncommonly vivid and comprehensive science-fiction universe in "The Chronicles of Riddick," complete with genuinely otherworldly planets and detailed cultural mythologies. But he spends so much time and energy on such...
Movie Review posted on 8th March 2005
Ready To Rumble
David Arquette's escaped-lunitic-on-a-double-espresso style of nitwit comedy is an aquired taste. Or at least I assume it is since I don't find him funny but movie directors continue to cast him and AT&T saw fit...
Movie Review posted on 8th March 2005
Love & Basketball
An inspired labor of love about sports and romance in which the female lead is an athlete, too, "Love and Basketball" is one for the "why didn't anybody think of this before?" file.For decades, the...
Movie Review posted on 8th March 2005
Andrew Lloyd Webber's The Phantom Of The Opera
Andrew Lloyd Webber's musicals are garish, puerile melodramas with all the elegance and sincerity of a Super Bowl halftime show -- and his brash, brassy songs have the depth and nuance of action-movie explosions.Director Joel...
Movie Review posted on 8th March 2005
Suggested
Leisure Festival - Dreamland in Margate
On the same day that Glastonbury welcomed back Margate's adopted sons, The Libertines, Margate itself put on it's very own Leisure Festival as it...
Pretty Fierce talk to us about collaborating with Doja Cat, emetophobia, arena tours and staying "true to yourself" [EXCLUSIVE]
Sheffield's very own all girl group Pretty Fierce are still on a high after the recent release of their debut single - 'Ready For Me'.
Will Varley & Jack Valero - The Astor Theatre Deal Live Review
Three nights before the end of his current tour Will Varley returned to his home town of Deal to delight a sold out crowd in The Astor Theatre.
WYSE talks to us about her "form of synaesthesia", collaborating with Radiohead's Thom York and the prospect of touring with a band [EXCLUSIVE]
With only a few days to go before Portsmouth based songstress and producer WYSE releases her new single, 'Belladonna', we caught up with her to find...
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Bay Bryan talks to us about being a "wee queer ginger", singing with Laura Marling and being inspired by Matilda [EXCLUSIVE]
Colorado raised, Glasgow educated and Manchester based Bay Bryan is nothing if not a multi-talented, multi-faceted artist performing as both...
Keelan X talks to us about staying true to "your creative vision", collaborating with Giorgio Moroder and being "a yoga nut" [EXCLUSIVE]
Former Marigolds band member Keelan Cunningham has rediscovered his love of music with his new solo project Keelan X.
![Luke De-Sciscio talks to us about having the courage to be yourself, forgiving that which is outside of one's control and following whims [EXCLUSIVE]](https://images.contactmusic.com/images/home/homepage/luke-de-sciscio-abof-a.jpg "Luke De-Sciscio talks to us about having the courage to be yourself, forgiving that which is outside of one's control and following whims [EXCLUSIVE]")
Luke De-Sciscio talks to us about having the courage to be yourself, forgiving that which is outside of one's control and following whims [EXCLUSIVE]
Wiltshire singer-songwriter Luke De Sciscio, formally known as Folk Boy, is set to release is latest album - 'The Banquet' via AntiFragile Music on...
Annie Elise talks to us about the challenges a female producer has to face and "going through a year of grief and sickness" [EXCLUSIVE]
Electronic music pioneer and producer Annie Elise says that the release of her first EP - 'Breathe In, Breathe Out' feels "both vulnerable and...
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