Articles by Steve Schneider
717 stories found. Showing page 1 of 36.
Florida Film Festival:Making faces: The 19th-annual Florida Film Festival unveils cinema’s variety of looks and voices
4/7/2010 | By Justin Strout, Rob Boylan, Trevor Fraser, William Goss, Billy Manes, Steve Schneider, Lindy T. Shepherd, Bob Whitby, Jessica Bryce Young
Florida Film Festival 2010 April 9 – April 18 at Enzian Theater, Regal Winter Park Village 20 and Plaza Cinema Café 407-629-1088 www.floridafilmfestival.com $10 (individual scr...[MORE]
Play it again, Larry: ’70s label exec looks back on life in the Casbah
10/14/2009 | By Steve Schneider
And Party Every Day: The Inside Story of Casablanca Records by Larry Harris with Curt Gooch and Jeff Suhs (Backbeat; $24.99; 310 pages) In terms of its role within the mus...[MORE]
DVDs Nuts!: Lesser-seen OW-approved titles
8/13/2009 | By Justin Strout, Steve Schneider
The Class Director Laurent Cantet’s Oscar-nominated French classroom drama (based on the loosely autobiographical book by teacher François Bégaudeau, who plays the ever-suff...[MORE]
Barely legal: The Florida Film Festival turns 18 and discovers its sexier side
3/26/2009 | By Justin Strout, Rob Boylan, William Goss, John Thomason, Steve Schneider, Jessica Bryce Young
Florida Film Festival 2009 March 27-April 5 at Enzian Theater and Regal Winter Park Village 20 $10 (individual screenings), $600 (Platinum Pass) 407-629-1088, ext. 225 www.floridafilmfestival.co...[MORE]
FFF: Documentary Features
3/26/2009 | By Justin Strout, John Thomason, Jessica Bryce Young, Steve Schneider, John Thomason
American Swing (2 Star) It’s the uninhibited ’70s, coke flows freely, sex is up for grabs and disco bangs overhead until the ’80s come crashing down. No, it’s not Boogie Nights, 54 or Inside Deep ...[MORE]
FFF: Narrative Features
3/26/2009 | By Justin Strout, Steve Schneider, Jessica Bryce Young, William Goss
(500) Days of Summer Not screened per studio request. Alien Trespass (1 Star) Former X-Files director R.W. Goodwin’s homage to sci-fi films of the ’50s like The Day the Earth Stood Still and The...[MORE]
FIRST SHOT
First Shot | 11/27/2008 | By Steve Schneider
Every year, the corporate-controlled media does its part to convince us that holiday retail sales are going to be taking a big upswing – except this time, when even the most overzealous CNN “a...[MORE]
FIRST SHOT
11/20/2008 | By Steve Schneider
Before the movie industry horned in on the act, Thanksgiving used to be a time for family. Why, some of our fondest memories of growing up involve bolting the door to our uncle’s den so we coul...[MORE]
FIRST SHOT
First Shot | 11/13/2008 | By Steve Schneider
A lot of you readers have probably felt some concern that this column often seems like little more than a platform for our incendiary political views, behind the flimsy guise of a movie roundup. W...[MORE]
FIRST SHOT
First Shot | 11/6/2008 | By Steve Schneider
Turn off your irony detector for a sec, because we gots something to say: People who write about film sure can be some serious tools. You wouldn’t think it would be that way. Given that “profess...[MORE]
FIRST SHOT
First Shot | 10/30/2008 | By Steve Schneider
Believe it or not, it’s not always easy to make these columns cohesive. Just look at the disparate ground we have to cover this week. First, there’s the Friday opening of all of this year’s non-Sa...[MORE]
FIRST SHOT
First Shot | 10/23/2008 | By Steve Schneider
We’re not in the habit of lauding multimedia corporations for their good sense and decency, but darned if the folks at Warner Bros. don’t keep racking up the Do-Bee points. First they responded t...[MORE]
FIRST SHOT
First Shot | 10/16/2008 | By Steve Schneider
You’ve gotta love a sore loser. Last week, we reported that at least one moviegoer had passed up the right-wing satire An American Carol because he had mistaken it for an actual Michael Moore pict...[MORE]
FIRST SHOT
First Shot | 10/9/2008 | By Steve Schneider
Is there anything more damaging than an ill-considered impersonation? Some viewers might think the only image problem Michael Chiklis ever faced was explaining why The Shield was wearing Fred Flin...[MORE]
FIRST SHOT
First Shot | 10/2/2008 | By Steve Schneider
Once again this week, we’re going to dispense with our normal pre-amble/ramble and get right to the handicapping. We could give you the standard excuse that there’s just too much concrete activity...[MORE]
FIRST SHOT
First Shot | 9/25/2008 | By Steve Schneider
We’re huge fans of the 2004 comedy Mean Girls, so we were as alarmed as anybody to hear that Paramount is developing a straight-to-DVD sequel to Tina Fey’s exposé of high-school demagogue...[MORE]
RAKE IT IN: Autumn films fall where they may
9/25/2008 | By Steve Schneider
The fall movie season has been up for grabs since Warner Bros. abruptly postponed Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince from November to next summer, worried that its 2009 box office would other...[MORE]
FIRST SHOT
First Shot | 9/18/2008 | By Steve Schneider
"Watch this,” we whispered to a buddy as the trailer for Sex Drive rolled. “In about five seconds, this chick is going to take a totally awesome gainer. Right on her face.” We hadn’t had ...[MORE]
FIRST SHOT
First Shot | 9/11/2008 | By Steve Schneider
Everything’s a movie these days, even stuff that isn’t. Sarah Palin had barely wrapped up her introductory address to the Wasilla Department of Public Works Republican National Convention when blo...[MORE]
FIRST SHOT
First Shot | 9/4/2008 | By Steve Schneider
If you’re headed to the flicks this weekend, don’t worry too much about finding a decent seat. The total of new wide releases comes to exactly one: Bangkok Dangerous, which at press time wasn’t ...[MORE]
717 stories found. Showing page 1 of 36.
1710 reviews found. Showing page 1 of 86.
Star Trek
Film review: by Steve Schneider | 5/7/2009
Admit it: You’ve harbored mixed emotions about Star Trek for many a moon. You first noticed them when you saw Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan, and you couldn’t decide if you empathized more with ...[MORE]
Two Lovers
Film review: by Steve Schneider | 3/5/2009
Critics aren’t supposed to let an artist’s behavior influence their assessment of his work. Yet that ideal is almost unattainable when somebody like Joaquin Phoenix uses the occasion of his lat...[MORE]
Watchmen
Film review: by Steve Schneider | 3/5/2009
Director Zack Snyder has his work cut out for him with Watchmen, his self-avowedly slavish adaptation of the watershed comic-book series. In 12 jam-packed issues, writer Alan Moore and artist ...[MORE]
THE READER
Film review: by Steve Schneider | 1/1/2009
If it ends up contributing nothing else to cinema, The Reader can always lay claim to having invented the concept of the meet-puke. One fateful day in 1958, 15-year-old German Michael Berg (Da...[MORE]
The Spirit
Film review: by Steve Schneider | 12/25/2008
At last winter’s New York Comic-Con, graphic-novelist-cum-filmmaker Frank Miller told an audience of fanboys how hard it had been to cast the lead of The Spirit, his adaptation of the seminal...[MORE]
Slumdog Millionaire
Film review: by Steve Schneider | 12/11/2008
In 1994, Robert Redford’s underappreciated Quiz Show used TV game shows as a metaphor for the duplicity with which our system bolsters those who fit the “winner” profile. Danny Boyle’s Slumdog...[MORE]
Let the Right One In
Film review: by Steve Schneider | 10/30/2008
Oskar (Kåre Hedebrant) is a 12-year-old punching bag. As pale, blond and weedy as a miniature Edgar Winter, he spends his school days fending off the attacks of his sadistic classmates. At h...[MORE]
Religulous
Film review: by Steve Schneider | 10/16/2008
Bill Maher really wants you to know how he feels about religious intolerance. Why, he’s positively intolerant of it. An uneasy fusion of a probing documentary and a neo–Lenny Bruce stand-up routi...[MORE]
The Visitor
Film review: by Steve Schneider | 5/1/2008
Richard Jenkins is the ideal leading man for a Thomas McCarthy movie. Five seasons as the ghostly Nathaniel Fisher on Six Feet Under honed Jenkins’ talent for playing the charismatic observ...[MORE]
Bratz
Film review: by Steve Schneider | 8/2/2007
The producers of this lame-brained tie-in say they wanted to scrape the inch-thick mascara off the toy industry’s most infamous collection of anorexic prosti-tots and expose the faces of genuine role ...[MORE]
The Simpsons Movie
Film review: by Steve Schneider | 7/26/2007
There’s a ridiculous idea out there that The Simpsons Movie has to equal the greatest moments of its TV parent, when it only needs to be as necessary to society as Munster Go Home. And boy, is it. The...[MORE]
Stardust Video & Coffee
Restaurant review: by Steve Schneider | 6/9/2005
It’s a coffeehouse, but Stardust sneaked an amazing selection of imported beers into the cooler (and a few wines onto the shelf). It’s like hanging out at home sampling beer from countries you can’t p...[MORE]
Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer
Film review: by Steve Schneider | 6/21/2007
Having unceremoniously face-raped Marvel Comics’ bedrock mythos with 2005’s Fantastic Four, Tim Story had nowhere to go but up. FF2 proves that he at least knows which direction “up” is, even if he on...[MORE]
Soon I Will Be Invincible
Book review: by Steve Schneider | 6/21/2007
The cover image that adorns Austin Grossman’s debut novel scans deceptively triumphant. A pair of gloved hands holds aloft a winged helmet, as if preparing to place it atop a deserving head in some ...[MORE]
Sweet Land
Film review: by Steve Schneider | 1/25/2007
What we have here is an otherwise respectable period drama that keeps descending to an after-school-special level of bluntness. Hating people for their nationality is really bad, see, which the unnece...[MORE]
Live To Win
Recording review: by Steve Schneider | 11/9/2006
Every 28 years or so, KISS frontman Stanley gets it together to record half an hour’s worth of solo soul-baring; geez, life must be horrible when the muse just won’t leave you alone. As expected, Live...[MORE]
Trust the Man
Film review: by Steve Schneider | 8/31/2006
This matched pair of New York breakup stories plays something like Your Friends and Neighbors without the intense psychological cruelty — and if you’re wondering what the point of that might be, y...[MORE]
The Quiet
Film review: by Steve Schneider | 8/31/2006
I can’t think of a human activity I’d recommend less than watching this hackneyed, straining-to-be-lurid domestic drama, the umpteenth cynical attempt to bait today’s supposedly alienated teen aud...[MORE]
Idlewild
Film review: by Steve Schneider | 8/31/2006
Contrary to expectations, the long-delayed OutKast movie doesn’t out-and-out stank — but it still could use massive recutting to make it less schizophrenic and taxing. The potentially troublesome ...[MORE]
The Illusionist
Film review: by Steve Schneider | 8/31/2006
You don’t have to have spent more than five minutes in the presence of a professional magician to recognize that Edward Norton has their entire act down. The piercing stare; the aura of benign yet v...[MORE]