Tim Robbins Page 2

An irreverent comedy in the style of the original M.A.S.H., this wartime romp takes an entertaining look at 24 hours in the life of a group of humanitarian workers in the Balkans in 1995. The film is funny, tense and packed with layers of drama, as Spanish filmmaker Fernando Leon de Aranoa cleverly recreates the setting with striking detail. Since it feels so realistic and is populated with lively characters, the film is thoroughly entertaining, even if it only barely seems to crack the surface.

It opens as aid worker Mambru (Benicio Del Toro) and his local translator Damir (Fedja Stukan) are trying to remove a body from a well so they can clean up the water supply for an isolated village. But their only rope is too frayed to work. Then jaded American colleague B (Tim Robbins) arrives with French rookie Sophie (Melanie Thierry), and as they try to find a rope they are joined by sexy Russian worker Katya (Olga Kurylenko), who has a past with Mambru. But there are constant roadblocks, literally and figuratively, as they try to solve this relatively simple problem. Along the way, they pick up a young orphan (Eldar Residovic) and try to reunite him with his family.

Every situation these people encounter is fraught with chaos, from the absurdities of military regulations to the complexities of local politics to the constant possibility of injury or even death. The filmmaker creates a terrific blackly comical tone that stresses the gallows humour these workers require to survive in an environment where children run around carrying big guns and rules are more important than innocent people's lives. This offbeat tone is engaging, especially with the snappy performances from Del Toro and Robbins as experienced men who know the ropes but insist on playing the game by their own rules. Thierry and Kurylenko are also good in less developed roles as the naive newbie and the steely ex, respectively. And Stukan and Residovic, plus a strong supporting cast, add lots of local colour.

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Over the last century, GM has made 400 million petrol-burning vehicles. They also created the EV1, the first modern electric car, but gave up on the idea, recalled and crushed them. As technology and commercial prospects improved, red-hot entrepreneur Musk launched Tesla, a high-end electric roadster. GM's car-guru Lutz responded with the Volt, a much-cheaper hybrid, while shark-like Nissan CEO Ghosn became determined to tap into a generation that won't even consider buying a fuel-burning car. Meanwhile, Gadget is quietly converting classic cars to electric engines.

Continue reading: Revenge Of The Electric Car Review

Comprised of dueling acoustic guitarists Jack Black and Kyle Gass, the D fills albums with harmonious and ridiculously clever odes to their own awesomeness. Their rock operas would make excellent B-sides for Meat Loaf's Bat Out of Hell album. Indeed, the band belongs on a triple bill with '70s monsters of melodic metal Black Sabbath and Queen.

Continue reading: Tenacious D: The Pick Of Destiny Review

Ironically, the early 1990s would bring to light the fact that carousing was what naval pilots seemed to do best: The 1986 Tailhook scandal occured during the same year Top Gun was released.

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Some manage, but most do not, and River drowns in tedium and cumbersome symbolism as a result. The 73-year-old Eastwood remains a meat-and-potatoes filmmaker. He's not afraid to take chances when selecting material, but his no-nonsense approach regardless of the content dooms this and other projects to a static and mind-numbingly wearisome state.

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The plot is dippy melodrama cloaked in politically charged keywords: corporate entities, genetic coding, the Haves and the Have Nots, multicultural whitewashing, language barriers, secret passports, checkpoints, homeland security. It's charged material, but Winterbottom transforms it into so much white noise. That's all right -- it provides a sheen that's nice to look at, and the keyword dialogue takes on a musicality when spoken by detective William Geld (Tim Robbins) and suspect Maria Gonzalez (Samantha Morton). But it's all a smokescreen meant to disguise a story about love found, love lost, and a tragic denouement made-to-order from the Oedipus legend.

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And so it is that in the terrorism-edgy mid-'00s, Steven Spielberg has resurrecteds War of the Worlds - again - and created the greatest alien invasion movie ever.

Continue reading: War Of The Worlds (2005) Review

I'm not talking about masked-psycho-with-a-chainsaw scary.That's kids' stuff. This is a slow, relentless, meticulous fear. It's thefear of uncertainty, the fear of grand-scale devastation that humanityis powerless to stop. It's a fear that fills the air like a storm and creepsup your spine in a way that's hard to shake. It is a fear not unlike whatevery American felt on September 11, 2001 -- but divorced from fact andrealigned as entertainment through the subconsciously reassuring comfortof a movie theater seat and a tub of popcorn.

It's visceral, it's psychological, and it comes more fromthe terrified performances of Tom Cruise and the remarkable Dakota Fanning(the angelic 10-year-old from "Hide& Seek" and "Manon Fire") -- as a dock-worker deadbeatdad and his daughter on the run from 100-foot alien killing machines --than from the film's hyper-realistic special effects and monsters (whicharen't that different from the ones in the shamelessly corny "Warof the Worlds" rip-off "Independence Day").

The film is worth seeing just to experience this fear,which is a testament to the power of cinema.

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Just about the time the fur was really flying between Microsoft and the Justice Department in 1999, screenwriter Howard Franklin ("The Man Who Knew Too Little") seized the day and scurried over to MGM with the kind of pitch that integrity-free studio execs love to hear: 25 words or less and based on an earlier, successful movie.

It must have gone something like this: What if we ripped off "The Firm," except instead of having a company full of evil lawyers trying to corrupt the hero, we'll feature a monopolizing Microsoft clone? We could get a low-rent, pretty boy matinee idol to play the college grad geek (he'll have no credibility, but what the hell? he'll bring in the teenage girls!) and he'll stumble on to a giant technology conspiracy masterminded by a very thinly veiled Bill Gates surrogate!

And thus was born "Antitrust," a transparent thriller from the recycle bin, transcribed into a laptop computer and retrofitted with an MP3 soundtrack, MTV editing and a cast of beautiful people where the nerds should be.

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There's just one thing standing in the way of "ArlingtonRoad" taking a place among the best film noir politics-and-paranoiathrillers -- the script is so tight that the hero is forced to make a dumbmistake now and again to advance the plot.

That hero is Jeff Bridges, playing a West Virginia historyprofessor who obsesses over his class in domestic terrorism because itdoubles as a form of therapy while grieving for his dead wife -- an FBIagent killed in a botched, Ruby Ridge-like raid.

He's a guy doesn't trust the government one bit, and inhis class sermonizes that federal and extremist conspiracies abound andthat the lone psycho theory applied to most American terrorists is a ruseby the feds to lull the populace into feeling safe again in the wake oftranquillity-shattering attacks.

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Perhaps it's not fair to begin a movie review by comparing a remake to its original, but since director Jonathan Demme has been proudly trumpeting "The Truth About Charlie" as a reimagining of Stanley Doden's 1963 romantic thriller "Charade," he's practically asking for it.

What the films have in common is a plot centering on a beautiful young woman named Regina (Audrey Hepburn then, Thandie Newton now) who returns to Paris from vacation to discover her husband has stripped their stylish apartment bare, disappeared with a fortune she didn't know he had, and subsequently turned up dead. With the money still missing, dangerous strangers start coming out of the woodwork, convinced she knows where it is.

In "Charade," Hepburn's sprightly Regina meets the suave and cunning -- perhaps a little too cunning -- Peter Joshua, played by Cary Grant, and falls for him as he tries to keep her safe and help her solve the mystery of the absconded riches. In "Charlie," Newton's clever but ingenuous Regina meets gym-buffed paramour Joshua Peters, played by Mark Wahlberg, who may look classy in a '60s-homage pokepie hat, but as a character he's dry, dry, dry.

Continue reading: The Truth About Charlie Review