To movie lovers everywhere, "Mr. Potter" always meant the crotchety villain of It's a Wonderful Life. But now, Dame Maggie's stern intonations of "Mr. Potter" herald the arrival of the hottest liter... 
In the early '70s, writer-director Melvin Van Peebles tired of being racist Hollywood's "niggerologist," threw caution to the wind, and set out to make an independent film. The result was Sweet Sweet... 
Love Me if You Dare, Yann Samuell's restless debut feature, begins beguilingly, develops into an intriguing but muddled midsection, and finally arrives at a frustrating split resolution which breaks... 
In 1986, Jim Jarmusch sat down slow-talker Steven Wright and whirling dervish Roberto Benigni with a mess of coffee and cigarettes and encouraged them to riff a meet-weird scene. Ever since, Jarmusch... 
Radioactive energy, thunderous footfalls, terror in the streets? These ominous signs can only mean one thing: the thrilla named Godzilla is back! Everyone's favorite 200-foot apocalyptic prehistoric... 
Fast but not terribly funny, Shrek 2 is the perfect movie to sort of pay attention to in the back of a minivan. At the screening I attended, the most vocal audience "response" was two children chasin... 
So is Wolfgang Petersen's Troy--inspired by Homer's 15,000-line epic poem The Iliad--true to its tony literary source, or just a post-Gladiator sword-and-sandal movie "epic"? Surprisingly, Troy is mo... 
In the greater Marx Brothers canon, A Night in Casablanca is a relatively minor effort, but after a slow, expository start, the film slowly, steadily makes a case for itself as a fine comic adventure... 
This oft-dismissed exception in the Marx Brothers canon includes no musical numbers and only a few bits specifically tailored to the brothers...underrated. 
Like the travelling circus it follows, the 1939 Marx Brothers effort At the Circus is all over the map. Though it's ultimately less than the sum of its parts, some of the parts are quite good and, ev... 
In the mid-1930s, the Marx Brothers flopped hard with their Paramount comedy Duck Soup (later named by the American Film Institute the fifth-funniest film ever made). Licking their wounds and watchin... 
The inimitable Marx Brothers followed up their magnum opus A Night at the Opera with the light-footed A Day at the Races, repository for another handful of elaborate and indelible comedy scenarios. F... 
The high-school hazing comedy Mean Girls--adapted by Tina Fey from Rosalind Wiseman's book Queen Bees and Wannabes: Helping Your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends and Other Realities of Ad... 
After striking a superficial resemblance to a classic romantic comedy like Adam's Rib--in which legal lovebirds Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn made a fairly even match--the newfangled romantic c... 
Too preposterous to be edgy, Tony Scott's Man on Fire is a slick and dreary penny dreadful (adjusted for inflation) that's only marginally more sophisticated than Walking Tall. At least the Rock's re... 
13 Going on 30 (or, as it's unofficially known, "Big With Breasts") trots out modern cinema's hazing ritual for up-and-coming performers: playing a child in an adult body. Since Mary Rodgers' novel F... 
With I'm Not Scared, Gabriele Salvatores contrasts the stereotypical images of Italian cinema--sun-dappled wheat-fields, breezy abandon, and tanned olive skin--with shadowy places both literal--like... 
With an appealing and exotic formal structure, South Korean director Kim Ki-Duk (The Isle) achieves the elegant simplicity of fable in Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter...and Spring. In a recurring motif,... 
Lars von Trier, the mad scientist of modern cinema, has outdone himself with Dogville. After similar experiments in the allegorical degradation and suffering of a female protagonist (Breaking the Wav... 
Ella Enchanted was obviously greenlit with the directive "Bring me a live-action Shrek for preteen girls!" (The Princess Bride and Ever After also leap to mind). At first, the movie is a bit dazzling... 
Ron Perlman--the Lon Chaney of our time--plays Hellboy with grit, humor, and a depth of feeling which, barely, grounds the movie.
Autumn Tale, from respected French auteur Eric Rohmer, is the last chapter of Rohmer's thematic Tales of the Four Seasons series, but it requires absolutely no foreknowledge. Rohmer is known for film... 
Someone figured out a long time ago that people on bikes are cinematic. Both on and off its central totem, Wang Xiaoshuai's Beijing Bicycle is beautiful to behold, to a point. The gorgeous cinematogr... 
Pearl Harbor spent a lot of money in an attempt to dazzle and sweep an audience into breathtaking WWII action and romance. But director Michael Bay threw a wrench in his own war machine by drowning...
The romantic drama In The Mood For Love marks the return of director Wong Kar-Wai, who was introduced to American audiences when Quentin Tarantino selected Chungking Express for distribution in 1995.... 
Though the release of Italian for Beginners may represent a move toward humbler releases for Miramax, it also represents the Weinsteins' ongoing savvy for pegging indies with broad appeal. Though Ita...
Sometimes felicitous timing can make the difference between unimagined success and obscurity. Kandahar, by Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf has reaped the dubious distinction of success made possi... 
Late Marriage relies on the element of surprise, so it's rather difficult to describe its effect (in fact, if you'd rather have no idea what you're in for, stop reading now and get to the theater). T... 
Miramax's over-the-top import Shaolin Soccer gleefully runs on the mock import of applying a fifteen-century old martial art to soccer. With the bold comic style of a lunatic cartoon, writer-director... 
If you watch the latest version of Walking Tall--and I recommend that you don't--just keep telling yourself, "It's 'inspired by a true story.'" Thusly, you can convert the Rock's latest vehicle from...
Home on the Range carries the dubious distinction of signalling the death knell of 2D animation (for now, at least). The last primarily hand-drawn feature produced by Walt Disney feature animation, H... 
This appropriately dour, stolid biopic of Irish-Australian folk anti-hero Edward "Ned" Kelly supplants the ridiculed Mick Jagger version--also titled Ned Kelly--by adapting Robert Drewe's historical... 
Though I'm a bit loathe to admit it, I grew up as a fan of Scooby Doo, so I warily carried my misguided affection for the titular mutt, the colorful Mystery Machine van, the haunted houses, and the c... 
Scooby Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed is, like the first film, not to my taste, but it does represent a hair's breadth of improvement and kiddies will giggle, so do as you will. The sequel reunites the Sc... 
Employing mesmerizing understatement, director Jafar Panahi spins Crimson Gold from a yarn scripted by Abbas Kiarostami. The film details the absurdity of the class gap in modern Tehran ("...a city o... 
Kevin Smith's Jersey Girl is only half as adorable as it is bad. Beladen with pop rock designed to goose emotions and blandly predictable in the extreme, this View Askew Film doesn't live up to Smith... 
Why don't we take off alone,
Take a trip far, far away,
We'll be together on our own again,
Like we used to in the early days...
It's like we both are falling in love again,
It'll be just like s... 
Taking Lives plays one of the more interesting gambits in recent cinematic history: by being willfully stupid and obvious for most of its running time, this serial-killer thriller lulls the audience... 
Across the cineplex from David Mamet's better mousetrap Spartan (admittedly built from old parts), writer-director David Koepp has the ignominious chore of reassembling Stephen King's dusty old contr... 
The classic TV spy series Get Smart replaced logic with comic absurdity. Agent Cody Banks 2: Destination London has no virtues to fill its yawning gaps of logic. Though the movie stars Frankie Muniz... 