Emilio Echevarria

The concept of three juxtaposed narratives, at least in the "flavor of the month" sense, can be traced to Quentin Tarantino, as can the gunslinging desperados and pop music that have become the humdrum trademark of Pulp Fiction imitators. Iñarritu is content to simply rehash those familiar elements. Perhaps that's why so much of this Academy Award nominated foreign film comes off like a movie you've seen more than once, translated a Español.

Continue reading: Amores Perros Review

If you want to remember the Alamo, the latest feature film version of the Texas fort's famous last stand may not be much help.

A beautifully produced but relatively bloodless (literally and figuratively) Hollywood rendering of the 1836 siege on San Antonio by tyrannical General Santa Anna, who was determined to recapture the territory for Mexico, it's a movie more concerned with details like Jim Bowie's terminal case of consumption than it is with the historical context of its story and its legendary characters.

In this movie, Bowie (Jason Patric) the frontier adventurer and volunteer army colonel is presented as little more than an infamous "knife fighter" haunted by his wife's death. Newspaper publisher, lawyer and militiaman Lt. Col. William B. Travis (Patrick Wilson) is just a determined dandy with questioned military skills (questioned mostly by Bowie) who rises to the occasion as temporary commander of these now-fortified grounds surrounding an unfinished mission. David "Davey" Crockett (Billy Bob Thornton) is a fiddle-playing former senator made famous by a stage play written about something he once did while wearing a coonskin hat -- and why he's even at the Alamo isn't entirely clear.

Continue reading: The Alamo Review