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Bill Gallo

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Gridiron Gang

Heavily padded football movie hits all the familiar notes

By Bill Gallo
Sep 14, 2006

The Rock -- formerly known as Flex Kavana and, a bit later, as Rocky Maivia -- was a practicing actor long before he turned to movies and started taking down $12 million paychecks. The happily deluded throngs who used to watch him lay signature moves like the People's Elbow or...
The Illusionist

Eerie melodrama explores the dark arts in turn-of-the-century Vienna

By Bill Gallo
Aug 17, 2006

If, at this remove, we can imagine Vienna in the late 1890s, we behold a great imperial capital in ferment. Gustav Mahler is not only reinventing the harmonic structure of serious music, he is getting his head seriously shrunk by Sigmund Freud. Arnold Schöenberg takes painting lessons from eroticist Richard...
London Fog

Woody Allen's second straight English excursion is a failed return to comedy

By Bill Gallo
Jul 27, 2006

For 35 years, Woody Allen was a long shot to stray into the Bronx or Staten Island -- much less the alien reaches of London, England. The creator of Manhattan has always been joined to his chosen borough like pastrami on rye, so when he ventured abroad last year to...
Free Kicks

Once in a Lifetime remembers when soccer players lived like rock stars

By Bill Gallo
Jul 27, 2006

When the clueless U.S. men's soccer team got dumped in the first round of the World Cup last month, American sports fans generally shrugged and went about their business. Aside from its popularity among millions of suburban schoolchildren, what most other earthlings call "the beautiful game" still arouses about the...
Deep Doo-doo

A modern-day Bonnie and Clyde are after your money again

By Bill Gallo
Jun 22, 2006

About three quarters of the way through Waist Deep, the hero of the piece -- an indestructible ex-convict who calls himself O2 (2 Fast 2 Furious star Tyrese Gibson) -- peers out through the swirling smoke and the bloody mayhem of an urban killing ground and experiences a revelation. "Somethin'...
Royal Flush

The King serves up a clumsy portrait of James Marsh's America

By Bill Gallo
Jun 15, 2006

It's clear by now that British director James Marsh regards America as a vaguely amusing madhouse -- a reliably primitive, thoroughly benighted backwater infested with dangerous grotesques. He is, after all, the fellow who gave us the supercilious TV documentary The Burger & The King: The Life & Cuisine of...
Un-American Dream

Goal! follows an immigrant's pursuit of a European fantasy

By Bill Gallo
May 11, 2006

The lovable hero of Goal! The Dream Begins is the kind of guy some Americans don't find very appealing these days: a Mexican immigrant who's trying to make a better life in East Los Angeles. Little matter that young Santiago Munez (Kuno Becker) busts his butt working two crappy jobs...
Here's Your Insight, Pal

James Redfield's Prophecy is one divine mess

By Bill Gallo
May 11, 2006

Vast legions embrace the thing as gospel. Skeptics dismiss it as ecstatic nonsense. In any event, James Redfield's peculiar novel The Celestine Prophecy has been a bulwark of New Age metaphysics since it first hit the best-seller lists back in 1993. By recent estimates, there are 14 million copies in...
Troubled Water

Deepa Mehta completes her trilogy amid outrage from Hindu fundamentalists

By Bill Gallo
May 11, 2006

If some religious extremists in India had gotten their way, the gorgeous fury of Deepa Mehta's Water never would have reached the screen. As it is, these self-appointed censors shut down the production for years by staging demonstrations, torching Mehta's sets and threatening her life. Eventually, the filmmaker moved her...
Hoop Dreams Come True

By Bill Gallo and Jordan Harper
Mar 16, 2006

Through the Fire (Disney) He's averaging just nine points in his second season for the Portland Trail Blazers, but considering where he came from and what he's overcome, Sebastian Telfair is doing just fine, thank you. Jonathan Hock's fascinating documentary takes us back to the young New York basketball legend's...
Cold Serial

The infamous Zodiac killer inspires another dead-end film

By Bill Gallo
Mar 16, 2006

Who knows? Maybe he developed writer's block. Or joined Up With People. Or dropped dead from shock the day Bush got re-elected. In any event, the notorious Northern California serial killer who called himself, rather grandiosely, the Zodiac, hasn't fired off a single letter to the editor since April 1978...
Kitty Litter

Steve Martin's Pink Panther piddles on its predecessor

By Bill Gallo
Feb 9, 2006

This is not George Lazenby making his doomed run at James Bond, or even Mel Gibson presuming to play Hamlet. This is serious heresy, combined with a touch of felonious assault. It has evidently not occurred to Steve Martin that, just as there is only one Eiffel Tower, there is...
Ride the Legend

The World's Fastest Indian is powered by Anthony Hopkins

By Bill Gallo
Feb 2, 2006

Anthony Hopkins lends style points to any movie in which he appears. The thing may be a dog, but the actor who brought the gruesome psychopath Hannibal Lecter to life and got deep inside a repressed English butler always gives us something fascinating to behold. The depth and gravity of...
Heavenly Hag

Emma Thompson's Nanny McPhee becomes a thing of beauty

By Bill Gallo
Jan 26, 2006

There is evidently no limit to the sacrifices actors will make for their art. If you thought beautiful Charlize Theron went the distance by transforming herself into a bloated, scowling murderess for Monster, just wait till you and the kids get a load of Emma Thompson in the darkly amusing...
Rocky Waters

Annapolis salutes all the classic boxing clichs

By Bill Gallo
Jan 26, 2006

No one has ever mistaken Rocky Balboa for an officer and a gentleman, but that's just about what we get in the numbingly predictable and none-too-stirring Annapolis, an underdog-makes-good boxing movie stuffed inside what amounts to a U.S. Navy recruiting pitch, with a dash of Good Will Hunting tossed in...
Tarnished Ivory

The White Countess writes an inglorious final chapter for a dynamic filmmaking duo

By Bill Gallo
Jan 19, 2006

With the release of The White Countess, the much-honored Merchant Ivory canon is complete. Bombay-born producer Ismail Merchant died in May 2005 at age 68, and whatever direction his longtime collaborator and life companion, director James Ivory, now chooses, the working partnership that gave us a dozen elegantly furnished period...
Romeo in the Rough

Tristan & Isolde's clumsy romance may make you crave Shakespeare

By Bill Gallo
Jan 12, 2006

Over the centuries, the legend of Tristan and Isolde has fueled the derring-do of King Arthur, aroused Richard Wagner's operatic thunder, driven poets as diverse as Shakespeare, Tennyson and Edwin Arlington Robinson to the heights of passion, and helped stock the back streets of Manhattan with companies of leaping Jets...
Bet on Black

Glory Road relives the season when college hoops smashed the color barrier

By Bill Gallo
Jan 12, 2006

Over the years, moviegoers who double as sports fans have had ample opportunity to pick and choose their favorite miracle -- Shoeless Joe Jackson emerging from the tall corn, Rudy suiting up for Notre Dame, Rocky going the distance with Apollo Creed, the U.S. hockey team taking down the Russkies...
The Nude Bomb

Mrs. Henderson shakes up war-torn Britain with an assault of the flesh

By Bill Gallo
Jan 12, 2006

The studied British theatricality and sharp wit of Mrs. Henderson Presents are likely to make it a favorite among nostalgiaphiles, theater buffs and the tea-and-crumpets set. Sailing along on the strength of another showy performance by Judi Dench, Stephen Frears's period frolic is this year's Being Julia, adorned with the...
Smiles to Go

Felicity Huffman is desperately engaging in an off-kilter road movie

By Bill Gallo
Jan 5, 2006

We popcorn-chomping hitchhikers never know who will pick us up on the roadside. In Flirting with Disaster, it was a neurotic Manhattan adoptee on a nationwide search for his biological parents. The desert-parched heroines of Thelma & Louise brought us along as they raised hell en route to their doom...
Beautiful Dreamer

An adopted transvestite searches for Mom but runs into everything else

By Bill Gallo
Dec 22, 2005

The gifted Irish novelist and filmmaker Neil Jordan (The Crying Game, Michael Collins) says that his overriding concern is "how individuals work with what they've been given." Case in point: Jordan's new feature, Breakfast on Pluto. This bittersweet, gender-bending drama takes a page from Candide -- its beleaguered hero, too,...
Backhanded Slapstick

Jim Carrey's brand of fun warms a reheated Dick and Jane

By Bill Gallo
Dec 22, 2005

The Jerry Lewis chromosome is running amok again inside Jim Carrey, and if you don't feel like getting clubbed half to death with a slapstick, stay away from Fun with Dick and Jane. On the other hand, if Carrey's tireless antics -- slithering onto nightclub tables, speaking in tongues and...

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Bill Gallo