Elvis Mitchell Quotes

Author Image

Elvis Mitchell

Profession : Critic

Birth : December 6, 1958

The road back from degradation begins with self-awareness - and sometimes, as in 'Phone Booth,' change can begin with a single phone call.

Elvis Mitchell

'Va Savoir' is a lovable comedy about love that looks upon life as drama and uses the world of the theater as a staging device.

Elvis Mitchell

The director Sofia Coppola's new comic melodrama, 'Lost in Translation,' thoroughly and touchingly connects the dots between three standards of yearning in movies: David Lean's 'Brief Encounter,' Richard Linklater's 'Before Sunrise' and Wong Kar-wai's 'In the Mood for Love.'

Elvis Mitchell

It may be a bit early to make such judgments, but 'Battlefield Earth' may well turn out to be the worst movie of this century.

Elvis Mitchell

'Plan Nine From Outer Space' for a new generation, 'Battlefield Earth' is set in the year 3000, after the beings from the planet Psychlo have conquered our planet in only nine minutes.

Elvis Mitchell

Adapted from the novel by L. Ron Hubbard, who cranked out sci-fi pulp by the cubic ton, 'Battlefield Earth' has the musty feel of the days when the genre's highlight was Flash Gordon.

Elvis Mitchell

What we're most aware of in 'Eight-Legged Freaks' is how similar it is to other movies, a recombinant mutated species itself, the product of the crossbreeding of the suffering-from-gigantism movies of the 1950s and the 1990 B-picture classic 'Tremors.'

Elvis Mitchell

'Eight-Legged Freaks' runs out of gas scarily fast - its one-joke premise lends itself more to a short than a feature.

Elvis Mitchell

Whom do you feel sorrier for: the cast of 'Boat Trip' or their children? Remember, kids can be very cruel - and this latest 'get Cuba Gooding Jr. career counseling fast' project is a misfire from beginning to end.

Elvis Mitchell

'Boat Trip' is more tiresome and dumb than actually bad.

Elvis Mitchell

'Black Hawk Down' has such distinctive visual aplomb that its jingoism starts to feel like part of its atmosphere.

Elvis Mitchell

'Black Hawk Down' wants to be about something, and in the midst of the meticulously staged gunfire, the picture seems to choose futility arbitrarily.

Elvis Mitchell

There's a great deal of echoing going on in 'Old School.' Mr. Piven, who played the upstart outsider in the 1994 campus comedy 'PCU,' has crossed over into playing the stiff martinet.

Elvis Mitchell

'Old School' is so breezy it could be a late-night talk show, especially when Craig Kilborn, of 'The Late Late Show,' sidles into camera range as a particularly loathsome competitor to Mitch.

Elvis Mitchell

In 'Windtalkers,' the director John Woo is meticulous in melding his own intimate style into the cliches of a large-scale war movie, paying homage to all the tired conventions of the genre. But it's an honor that these cliches don't deserve.

Elvis Mitchell

Given the knee-jerk patriotism of recent war movies, it's discouraging to see 'Windtalkers' evade pertinent facts that could have recast the doubled-edged issues of racism and loyalty and made them relevant to contemporary times.

Elvis Mitchell

When an actor commits himself to a role as fully as Russell Crowe does in the grandiose and silly 'Gladiator,' you may ask yourself why and at the same time thank him for his absorption in the part.

Elvis Mitchell

The story of a proud Roman soldier who is sold into slavery and must fight his way back to freedom, 'Gladiator' suggests what would happen if someone made a movie of the imminent extreme-football league and shot it as if it were a Chanel commercial.

Elvis Mitchell

His work isn't all glower. Even though he hasn't smiled in a movie since the underrated 'Proof' in the early 1990s, Mr. Crowe is given to a hurt swallow when he's uncomfortable and to a look of suffering in his eyes.

Elvis Mitchell

The battle scenes in 'Gladiator' don't have the exultant lift of Hong Kong period-action pictures like the 'Once Upon a Time in China' series, where the fights have the eye-popping panache of dance sequences from a musical.

Elvis Mitchell