Here's the big secret about Sarah Silverman that the 14,000 magazine profiles last fall all missed: She isn't all that relevant. She's smart and charismatic, and any comic who can make observations like "If you ever take a shower with your boyfriend, your breasts will be squeaky clean" is worthy of respect. But her "coquette provocateur" act is based on her being so ironically petulant that her jokes recede from real meaning. They singe, but never burn. Nevertheless, Silverman's concert film Jesus Is Magic (Interscope) is well worth seeing, because her go-for-broke performance and surprisingly strong musical ability make her a consummate entertainer, if not an especially daring one…
At a time when overzealous border patrols, citizen groups like The Minutemen, and talking-head blowhards like Lou Dobbs are tarring Mexican illegals as felons, Tommy Lee Jones' directorial debut The Three Burials Of Melquiades Estrada (Sony) restores a sliver of dignity to desperate men who labor in anonymity. Though it lapses into sentimentality, Jones' tale of a gruff old cowboy who carries a dead Mexican ranch-head back across the border for burial resonates with quiet confidence and great feeling…
The inspirational story of Don Haskins, the Texas Western coach who brought the first all-black starting five to the NCAA Championship basketball game against Adolph Rupp's lily-white Kentucky juggernaut, fell into the hands of producer Jerry Bruckheimer. So this much from Glory Road (Buena Vista) is verifiable: There is a game called basketball, and it is played with two hoops and a round sphere that bounces. Just about everything else in the film is up for dispute…
Harrison Ford's latest rote action-thriller, Firewall (Warner Bros.) follows a simple formula for its bank-heist/home-invasion scenario: It's roughly 50 percent Panic Room, 40 percent The Desperate Hours, 40 percent Swordfish, and 20 percent leftover bits of other Ford actioners from the last decade. That adds up to a lot more than 100 percent, which may be why the film feels so rushed and overcrowded, and why villain Paul Bettany and co-star Virginia Madsen only barely have time to establish themselves as dull stereotypes…
Remember back in 2003, when The A.V. Club said the convoluted, pretentious vampires-vs.-werewolves combat-fest Underworld felt like "a prequel to a movie not worth seeing in the first place"? At long last, the even more convoluted follow-up Underworld: Evolution (Sony) has proved that description true.