DANCE MUSIC VIDEO, NEW MUSIC & DANCER RENE BLANCO, DANCE VIDEOS AROUND THE WORLD, FREE STREAMING VIDEO & DOWNLOAD

Boston Globe -- Ty Burr columns

A timeless family 'Christmas'
To tweak Tolstoy: All happy families may be alike, but all unhappy-family movies are entertaining in their own ways.
Cinematic riches in 'Millionaire'
I'll keep this simple: Cancel whatever you're doing tonight and go see "Slumdog Millionaire" instead. Yes, you, the girl obsessed with "Twilight" and the guy still hung up on "The Dark Knight." Take the grandparents, too, and the teenagers. Everyone can play.
Undying love
Remember the first high school crush who crushed on you back? Remember trembling right at the precipice of desire, of being flattened by emotions for which you had no words? Remember how it felt to know someone else's secret self - the frightening power it gave you and the danger of potential self-obliteration? Remember when love meant more than death?
The man, the myth, the muscles
'JCVD" may not be the first meta-musclehead movie, but it's certainly the most surprising. Of all the rippled hunks bone-breaking their way through the last 20 years of action films, Jean-Claude Van Damme would seem to be the least self-aware. A bantam fighting cock, "The Muscles From Brussels" has postured, preened, and kickboxed his way through 30-plus movies, almost all ...
Friends amid the madness
Films that combine the Holocaust and children are generally, and correctly, understood to be a really bad idea. Nothing trivializes mass murder like cliches of youthful innocence; nothing says "kitsch" like death-camp kiddie sentiment. Yet filmmakers keep mixing the two with the best of intentions, from Jerry Lewis (whose "The Day the Clown Cried" remains an unscreened legend of bad ...
Bringing to life a struggle for survival
Can you call a movie "feel-good" if it includes an aviation disaster, a deadly avalanche, and human cannibalism? That's the paradox of the grueling yet ultimately exhilarating "Stranded: I've Come From a Plane That Crashed on the Mountains."
Crichton was a paradox of high concept, pop culture
For better and occasionally for worse, Michael Crichton's 6-foot-9 frame loomed over the culture like an educated T. Rex. Without the novelist/screenwriter/director, who died Tuesday at 66 of cancer, there would be no "Jurassic Park," "Andromeda Strain," or "ER." On the other hand, without Crichton, there would also be no "Congo," "The Lost World," or "Disclosure." The films he contributed ...
Role models so bad they're good
'Role Models" might just be this year's "Bad Santa." Not because it's foul-mouthed and foul-minded in ways calculated to appall all right-thinking moviegoers, although it's certainly that. Any movie that shows its heroes firing up a joint between stints as high-school anti-drug crusaders is true to its black little heart.
'Save Me' is a matter of faith
An earnest drama about the futility of "rescuing" gay men back to Jesus, "Save Me" presents a paradox: It's an issue drama in which the most compassionately drawn character is on the other side of the issue.
In 'Bruce,' the joke's on him
Actor Bruce Campbell has endured for 25 years because he takes the drive-in dreck in which he stars far less seriously than anyone else, including the audience. To be the main attraction in bottom feeders like "Mindwarp," "Man With the Screaming Brain," and "Maniac Cop" - and let's not forget "Maniac Cop 2" - is to either despair or laugh ...
Being Charlie Kaufman
Interviewing Charlie Kaufman is like sprinkling salt on a slug. Each question seems to lay a psychic burden on the 49-year-old writer-director's soul; answers emerge painstakingly from some dark well within. Often he'll scrunch his eyes tightly shut as he speaks, as though trying to read his thoughts on the back of his eyelids.
Horror tales with a light, creepy touch
'Fear(s) of the Dark" works the exact opposite end of the horror spectrum from a film like "Saw V." Instead of hyperreal live-action gore, this French short-story anthology delivers unsettling animated nightmares, light on explicitness and long on hard-to-shake creepiness. It makes a nicely grim little Halloween appetizer, although you may want to go home and hide under the bed ...
Thomas shines as a woman haunted
In "I've Loved You So Long," Kristin Scott Thomas is like a flower opening in extreme slow motion. Her character, a recently paroled murderess named Juliette Fontaine, is drab and desiccated when we first meet her - a dead thing - yet by the final frames she's fully among the living, and the transition has been so subtle it's impossible ...
An aging beauty is restored to glory
Certain artifacts represent the outer limits of their form - they may or may not be the best but they're unquestionably the most. Modern art has its "Les Demoiselles D'Avignon" and Monet cathedrals; the piano has Beethoven's 32d Sonata. Rock 'n' roll has "Like a Rolling Stone," architecture has Gaudi, poetry has Blake, and fiction has Nabokov. The classical cinema ...
A bawdy, funny 'Porno' for tyros
It's just possible that Kevin Smith has found a way to beat the economic recession and the energy crisis at the same time. Regardless of which candidate takes next week's election, this soft-centered, down-and-dirty comedy foresees an era of mom-and-pop pornography that could well erase the national debt and lift the national libido. At the least, we'll stay warm through ...
In 'Pride and Glory' it's all in the precinct
The funeral finally arrives 45 minutes into "Pride and Glory," but the movie's been preparing for it from the opening credits: Everything in this good-cop/bad-cop action drama is shrouded in gray and attended by wailing. This isn't a feel-good genre, granted, but does it have to feel this bad?
Madonna runs out of steam
Now that Madonna and Guy Ritchie have officially called it quits, all that remains is the issue of custody. Madge should get the children and the brassiere collection. Based on her directorial debut, Ritchie should get the filmmaking career.
No surprise: 'Musical' goes according to plan
'What if it's, like, really dumb and I can't flip the channel?" worried my 11-year-old daughter's friend as we settled in for "High School Musical 3: Senior Year." Honey, I feel your pain. Like a massive gelatinous beast in a 1950s sci-fi movie, Disney's new franchise has extruded its latest brand extension onto the big screen. Troy, Gabriella, Sharpay and ...
A curious George
Is there an easier target than a lame duck? "W.," the first biopic ever made about a sitting US president, is either two years too late or 15 too early. George W. Bush hardly seems to matter anymore; attention has shifted to the two men who are vying to clean up the mess his administration has left behind. As it ...
Driving Miss Sunshine
Is optimism worth it? Mike Leigh's "Happy-Go-Lucky" wonders, and so might a moviegoer stumbling into a theater during dreadful economic and political times. The new film from the mischievous British filmmaker and social theorist puts one of life's natural sunflowers center screen and dares you not to be driven crazy by her relentless good cheer. Thank God for the Poppys ...

[ Back ]