items tagged with Djimon Hounsou

THE ALAMO

The Alamo is surprisingly not-bad. John Lee Hancock’s long-delayed drama is by no means a great movie, but it’s a pretty darned good audience movie, a middlebrow weeper like A Beautiful Mind or Titanic that, despite its flaws (and against your better judgment), you can find yourself really falling for.

SEABISCUIT

Seabiscuit arrives as such a breath of fresh air – an inspirational period piece in a sea of noisy, formulaic action drivel – that you wish to God the movie was better than it actually is.

ANTWONE FISHER

It’s a bit late, but it finally arrived. The closing of each year brings with it at least one touching, inspirational, triumph-of-the-human-spirit movie designed to make audiences weep and Oscar voters genuflect, while certain Midwestern film critics roll their eyes and wish they could throw things at the screen. (Previous examples: I Am Sam, The Hurricane, and Shine.) For a while, it looked like 2002’s might be About Schmidt, but the film barely qualified; it wasn’t incompetently made, and it did provide a few laughs. At last, though, we have a winner.

GLADIATOR

Ridley Scott's Gladiator, a surprisingly pungent and entertaining historical epic, displays, among other things, the pleasures of a great audience-grabbing pot (based loosely on actual events).