Movies: September 2006 Archives

Saddening but riveting, and possessed of a positively wicked wit, The Death of Mr. Lazarescu is executed with the sensitivity of great literature and the panache of bravura filmmaking.

If you favor movies that boast bold visuals and brash action, you may well find Crank to be a veritable font of cinematic pleasure. Reliable man-of-small-words-and-big-action Jason Statham (“The Transporter”) stars as Chev Chelios, a tightly wound hit man who’s been injected with an exotic poison that will kill him if he allows his adrenaline levels to flag.

The title of Pedro Almodóvar's new movie, Volver, literally means "to return." But, at least when pronounced with an American accent, it's not hard to imagine an aural pun referring to a certain part of a woman's anatomy. If that's deliberate, then the title is not only a reference to the film's status as figurative ghost story, but also a declaration of intent to explore the lives of a handful of women sprung (as all women are) from the wombs of their mothers.

When I was a kid growing up in Southern Colorado, my grandfather had one of those black-and-white TV sets with a screen a few inches across that sat in a box a little bit smaller than a tower PC case. He kept it near his regular chair at the kitchen table, where he smoked cigarettes and worked crossword puzzles. I can’t remember exactly how, but I discovered that under certain conditions you could use that set — and no other TV in the house — to tune in the independent channel 2, broadcasting out of that metropolis 120 miles to the north, Denver. And if you tuned in weekdays at 5 p.m. and squinted through the snow, and were willing to sit there at the kitchen table staring at a tiny, black-and-white screen, you could see the Adventures of Superman series in syndicated reruns. It seemed like it was worth going through just about any inconvenience to see Adventures of Superman.