items tagged with Alfred Molina

CORALINE

Employing extraordinarily supple, nearly tactile stop-motion animation and 3D effects, the children's film Coraline is filled with visual magic, and just about corners the market on unsettling imagery. A grinning pair of parental doppelgängers, with buttons sewn into their eye sockets, serve a dinner composed of mango milkshakes and chocolate beetles. Two morbidly obese British dowagers unzip their skins and emerge as lithe trapeze artists. A feral alley cat talks, and a theatre full of mutts attends a vaudeville, and it's all strange and clever and tantalizingly designed. Is it ungrateful, if not downright senseless, to admit that I could hardly wait for this movie to end?

This past Friday, larger movie markets saw the debuts of John Patrick Shanley's Doubt, Clint Eastwood's Gran Torino, and Steven Soderbergh's Argentinia epic Che.

Our market, meanwhile, only got The Day the Earth Stood Still, Nothing Like the Holidays, and Delgo.

Sigh. Let's dive in, then.

THE HOAX

Offhand, I can think of no performer less well-suited to play a desperate, talkative, Jewish novelist than Richard Gere. Yet in Lasse Hallström's The Hoax, Gere is asked to portray exactly that - real-life author Clifford Irving, who, in 1971, received a $1-million advance for concocting a fictional autobiography of reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes - and the perceived miscasting turns out to be the movie's subtlest masterstroke.

COLLATERAL

Collateral’s plot is so High Concept you can barely believe it hasn’t been filmed before: A cab driver (Jamie Foxx) unknowingly picks up a hired assassin (Tom Cruise) as a fare, and spends a long, strange evening chauffeuring him from one execution site to another, all the while trying to prevent the killer from performing his rounds without, of course, getting himself killed in the process.

SPIDER-MAN 2

Spider-Man 2 might not be, as many critics have concluded, the greatest comic-book movie ever made, but it’s entirely possible that Sam Raimi is the greatest director the genre has ever had.