Movie Reviews

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These are (mostly) very short reviews of pretty much every movie I've seen in a theater for the last several years, minus a few I forgot to write about. I guarantee not to ruin your enjoyment of a movie by giving away key plot elements, unlike every professional reviewer on the planet. I reserve the right to ruin your enjoyment through other means, though. I also guarantee that if you share my exact taste in movies, you'll find that the ratings are very accurate.

(By the way, if anyone out there ever looks at this page and has some kind of reaction, however mild, pro or con or otherwise, feel free to email me: tu@tulrich.com.

• * A waste of time
• ** Won't kill you
• *** Better than your average TV show
• **** Put it on your list

Penn gets back to his roots: he breathes life into Emmet Ray, a character nearly as compelling as Jeff Spicoli.

Too long, but otherwise excellent, so be prepared with an empty bladder and a full bag of popcorn.

Two great tastes that go great together: campy sci-fi and spoof of campy sci-fi.

Solid acting, nice locations, some good suspense with a few surprising twists.

Wacky Spanish stuff, as usual.

A very funny thing, this movie. Has some of that surreal feeling of Run Lola Run and The Matrix, but taken in a different direction.

A "dark comedy" that's actually both funny and dark. The casting is genius.

Techno-ish and arty, but watchable. Has some interesting videogame influences in visuals and structure. Julie wanted me to add: "People should know that if you go see this movie, you'll see a lot of Lola running, but it's OK because she's good at it."

Had a couple of good action scenes, but otherwise bland.

Didn't completely suck, but gets an extra deduction for deflating my too-high expectations.

The best movie of its kind I've ever seen, its kind being cyberpunk-techno-sci-fi-action-thriller.

Interesting concept, really bad execution.

Documentary covering the odyssey of Jewish Holocaust survivors in the years between the end of WWII and the establishment of the state of Israel. Pretty incredible stuff.

About as grim, gritty and "working class" as it gets. Not a lot of comic relief or heartwarming "Family Ties" moments, so viewer emptor. The accents were tough for me to follow.

Lifeless noir with a great cast. Even movie-starved in Botswana I was disappointed.

Entertaining.

Good old stick-to-the-ribs big-budget Hollywood action-comedy. Nothing more, nothing less.

Indie slow-paced sort-of-romantic, sort-of-comedy. Not terrible, but not great either. Kind of in the lukewarm water category.

Vintage Spielberg: the battle scenes are fantastic, while the story is melodramatic puff at the core. Overall it's still solid entertainment.

About a tortured mathematician. Has some great visuals and gives a very believable representation of what a migraine headache is like, but it lacks balance and is way too long at 85 minutes. For the record, Julie hated it.

Mediocre. There was one chase scene that I enjoyed, but otherwise it lacked suspense or surprises.

I laughed until it hurt. I am a big fan of this movie. If you've seen the preview, you have a pretty good idea what you're in for.

This is not really a self-contained movie, it's more of a 2-hour extra-high-budget X-Files episode. Not a bad episode, but I don't feel that the feature-film format adds much to the experience.

Depressingly incompetent attempt at documentary, focusing on the death of Kurt Cobain. Not only is Broomfield a terrible interviewer, he has no feel for his subject.

The movie is OK, but it could have been much better. Three stars is a bit of a stretch, but I don't do that wishy-washy half-star crap, remember?

Plain, timid young woman takes temp job and makes friends with the other temps. Threateningly slow and arty at a couple of points, but overall I really liked it.

Quality! Suspense/espionage/con-game kinda story. The Game was this good, in its dreams. And it even features a scene shot in and around the A Street Deli.

I enjoyed it. Follows a charismatic but fairly nutty fundamentalist preacher from Texas through all sorts of hijinks.

Not as good as Fargo, in my opinion, but still pretty excellent.

Twisted, but great.

Arty. I think it was a little too subtle for me, because even though I thought some parts were really good, I don't think I really "got" it. Maybe there was nothing to get. Maybe I'm just thick. Maybe you should consult Siskel 'n Ebert.

Woody plays a brilliant writer who behaves like a pig in his personal life. The execution is clever and hilarious as usual, but while the movie is very well done, I was more than a little distracted because I kept thinking about the parallels to the recent activities of the real-life Woody Allen.

Not as good as Pulp Fiction, but what is? Not nearly as graphic, either, for those who care one way or another. Earns extra punk points for casting somewhat chunky and aging (though still "foxy") Pam Grier in the title role.

Story, acting and visuals all come together in a most pleasing manner. Go see it.

One fairly minor point: In Gus Van Sant's last movie, To Die For, I was disappointed by the lack of fidelity to the sights and sounds of Seacoast NH, having grown up in the area, although otherwise it was a great movie. In contrast, Good Will Hunting does an excellent job representing its Boston setting.

Romantic comedy. Nicholson's character says some offensive stuff that's usually pretty funny. On the other hand, I was a tad bothered by the extreme age difference between the positively dewy Helen Hunt and Nicholson's wrinkled old lech. Deduct one star from an otherwise three-star outing.

This is an excellent movie. (It's a graphic depiction of some folks who made porno movies in the 70's and early 80's, so it's not for everyone. You know who you are.)

A young, attractive but desperate hoodlum couple runs from the law across the (Australian) desert, and it's actually worth watching. Eat your heart out, Oliver Stone.

One surprising thing about the movie is that there's no cheesy alternative rock on the soundtrack. In fact, there's no music at all. It's strange and kind of refreshing.

Agreeable historical biopic. On the light end of the spectrum, although it depicts some pivotal pre-French Revolution events. Nothing you haven't seen before on Masterpiece Theatre, but hey, history is cool.

A strange movie. It drags shamelessly, in more ways than one. It's often self-consciously weird, and other times just plain regular weird. And a few times it looks like a mediocre made-for-TV movie. But, I liked it anyway.

Watchable, yet not very involving -- strangely so, in fact, for a big-time director Hollywood formula flick. Not sloppy, just sort of unfocused.

I saw this a while ago, but forgot to review it. In a nutshell, it's great. It's a documentary of the boxing match between Ali and Foreman held in Zaire in the mid 70's, the "Rumble In The Jungle". I'm not much of a boxing fan, but I found it 100% riveting. There were some amazing personalities that converged at this event, and the movie really brings out the drama.

I forgot to review this movie also. It's pretty excellent. Hilarious, life-affirming, feel-good, etc, but not smarmy or cheesy, that rarest of combinations.

A full-on immersion in early 70's Connecticut sex-obsessed suburbia. There are some funny parts, some sad parts, some exciting parts and some boring parts.

Argh!! It's almost worthy of cult-worship, but falls annoyingly short. Heinlein should have included a foreword to the book reading something like: "After I'm dead and buried, when some hotshot Hollywood action-movie director makes a high-budget no-holds-barred extravaganza based on this book, someone please tell him that THE INFANTRY 'SUIT' IS NOT OPTIONAL, DILLWEED!!!" Damn. It's one of the coolest things in the book, and I'm going to tell you about it since Paul Verhoeven dropped the ball: the Suit that the Mobile Infantry guys in the book wear is a high-powered armored exoskeleton bristling with sensors, scanners, guns, lasers, flamethrowers, grappling hooks, jet packs, shuriken, steak knives, silly string, and so on. In it, a trooper can literally leap tall buildings in a single bound and race speeding locomotives, not to mention pound the living crap out of all manner of hostile extra-terrestrials. It's a crucial technological factor justifying the elite nature of the Mobile Infantry: by vastly enhancing the destructive power of the individual, the MI can afford to weed out all but the very toughest, meanest, baddest mofos coming through their boot camp, and succeed even with a relatively small number of troopers -- in sharp contrast to the humans' arch-enemy Bugs, whose military strategy involves swarms of millions of giant bloodthirsty ant-like fighter drones.

Well, they left the Suit out, replacing the few fearsome Starship Troopers of the book with vaguely insect-like hordes of somewhat less fearsome members of the coed varsity football team trudging around in plastic helmets and carrying conventional machine guns. Maybe they were trying to make some subtle meta-point about the inherent similarity between the Bugs and the humans... ah, forgetaboutit, it falls flat anyway.

Aside from that, there's some awesome stuff in the movie. It's kind of an Archie & Veronica Vs The Space Aliens, with an alarming amount of gore and over-the-top, inventive visual effects. The catchy jingoism from the book is well represented, as are many of the pleasingly peculiar future-history twists. The movie could have reached a four star rating, but halfway through the second hour, the highly entertaining cartoonish violence and rocket-age spoofs peter out and the sci-fi movie cliches, loud pointless explosions, and improbable coincidences start to take over.

Documentary about four oddballs, perhaps geniuses as well. Rod Brooks makes biology-inspired robots at MIT, Ray Mendez studies the African Naked Mole Rat, the only known hive-oriented mammal, another guy tames lions and tigers in the circus, and yet another guy tends a topiary garden. The visual and sonic trickery is a little over the top, but it hits the spot if you just sit back and soak it in.

This is the undisputed King of all slow boring movies. Imagine The English Patient, but instead of watching chiseled actors wearing J Peterman outfits, mapping the Sahara, and running from the chaos of war, focus on a non-descript guy in Ohio washing dishes, operating a plastic-molding machine, and taking warehouse inventory.

Yow. This gets a marginal three-star rating, 'cause it's really not that enjoyable to watch. But, it's well made and somewhat thought provoking. Not a good date movie.

Too many characters and themes even for a long movie like this one, but it's entertaining fake-noir cop stuff nonetheless.

Too long, but otherwise well done. I feel somewhat cheated, as they certainly could have made the protagonist more interesting, but instead there are lots of long, mostly empty shots interspersed with the action.

Not quite Dead Calm, but in the same ballpark. Unlike The Game, the pace is perfectly measured and the running length is just right.

I don't know why I go see movies like this. I guess sometimes they're good. I found this one pretty boring, although it does serve as definitive proof that French people are even goofier than you think.

I admit it, I haven't seen Clerks or Mall Rats. Clearly I need to, because the best parts of this movie are the many puerile funny bits. The vaunted 'maturity' of this latest outing comes out a little flat, but hey.

Low key indie with some funny parts. A little too low key for me, though... verges on pointless.

w/ Howard Stern et al

Not God's gift to cinema, but solid entertainment. Stern comes off as the All-American nice guy, making me suspect it's really just a big PR project.

Dir. Nick Cassavetes, w/ Gena Rowlands, Marisa Tomei, Gerard Depardieu, et al

Julie loved it (four stars), I enjoyed it. Has some characteristics of the dreaded "chick movie", but overall a thumbs up.

w/ Christopher Guest, Parker Posey, et al

Mockumentary that captures the sights, sounds, and smells of small-time community theatre. This Is Not Spinal Tap, but it's pretty good.

Dir. Lars von Trier

Long, arty, and shot with a vomit-inducing hand-held camera, but a great movie anyway.

w/ Kristin Scott Thomas, Ralph Feinnes, Willem Defoe, Juliette Binoche, etc

Nice scenery, decent story, kind of long, and lay off the hype a little, eh?

Pretty good mainstream suspense movie.

Passable Gen-X thing. Some funny stuff, some annoying stuff.

Decent. Has a tendency to get a little cheesy and sentimental, and doesn't really dig too deeply, but it's entertaining. Not one of Spike Lee's best.

Funny low-key story about three Jersey losers who try a variety of money-making schemes.

Pretty long aimless story about what a pig Picasso was.

Black comedy executive produced by Quentin Tarantino; contains the requisite gore. Jones is fascinating and super-cute. Well acted, well directed, and the Latin soundtrack is really excellent. My only complaint is that the story is a touch thin.

Very simple, enjoyable, slow-paced depiction of two Italian immigrant brothers running a restaurant. Yum.

A high quality night out at the movies. I generally consider Buscemi's presence on the cast of a movie to be a solid endorsement, and this movie is as good as or better than any other movie he's been in. The cinematic equivalent of a tall pitcher of Long Island Ice Tea.

Patricia Arquette turns in a typically mediocre performance in this adaptation of the Joseph Conrad novel. Everyone else is pretty good. The screenplay butchers the book without mercy, but there are a few bright spots, especially Robin Williams' nihilist bomb-builder.

One time on PBS I saw a show about diners. There's a diner in Pennsylvania which has an item on their menu consisting of: a 1/3 pound hot dog, split down the middle and filled with a piece of American cheese, all wrapped in two slices of bacon, breaded, deep fried, and served on a buttered bun with chips and cole slaw. And a large coke. This movie was just like that.

A brilliant concept... unless you have to watch it. I don't feel I'm giving too much away by saying that you see the same exact story three times in different settings with different characters. Makes for a pretty boring Sunday Night. I think other Hal Hartley movies are better, but this one makes me wary. There are a couple funny and/or clever parts. So what.

A pretty good movie about a small Texas border town. Much of the plot is telegraphed in advance, but there are a few twists and turns that I didn't anticipate. I thought there were a few spots where it seemed a little contrived, but hey, why not.

Ruthlessly accurate portrayal of sixth grade from the point of view of an awkward bespectacled misfit. Not a real feel-good flick, sort of the flip side of Dazed And Confused.