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... 
I can't exactly recommend Starsky & Hutch, a big-screen remake of the '70s TV-cop show, but I can't claim not to have laughed from time to time, either. Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson bring their we... 
Writer-director Siddiq Barmak's Osama--the first all-Afghan film to emerge since the fall of the Taliban--paints a visually striking and decidedly haunting mural of the Taliban's reign of terror. As... 
Critics hate little more than when bad movies happen to good people. But unless the moguls at Paramount Pictures had incriminating photos of Philip Kaufman--director of The Right Stuff and The Unbear... 
If you want a good chuckle, sneak into a theatre showing the new Dirty Dancing movie in time to catch the opening credit. After a teaser which establishes (through dingbatted narration) the middle-cl... 
In Wolfgang Becker's Good Bye, Lenin!, a bit of background propaganda proclaims, "PEOPLE ARE AT THE CENTER OF SOCIALIST SOCIETY," and indeed this farce driven by historic global change makes more tha... 
Right from its animated title sequence, Eurotrip announces itself as a party movie chock full of sex, booze, and rock and roll. It's R-rated, but sure to be the latest coolest movie amongst the high... 
If you're ready for Meg Ryan to wrap a gum-cracking accent around lines like "That was off the hook!" and "He's the bomb!" strap in for Against the Ropes, a modern melodrama audacious enough to claim... 
Despite the presence of Oscar-winning actors Gene Hackman and Marcia Gay Harden, TV funnyman Ray Romano, and an ensemble of well-liked former stars of stage and (mostly small) screen, Welcome to Moos... 
I'll admit it up front: 50 First Dates, like all Adam Sandler movies, is essentially critic-proof. What can I say? Sandler fans will love this carefully constructed Sander-formula flick (including a... 
When Louis Kahn died of a heart attack, alone and unrecognized, in a men's room of a New York railway station, he left a concrete legacy of brick and stone and an ephemeral one, shrouded in mystery.... 
Silly adults—heists are for kids! 20th Century Fox's Catch That Kid takes 2002's well-regarded Danish family film Klatretøsen and turns it into Hollywood mulch. Movies like Catch That Ki... 
With Barbershop 2: Back in Business, executive producer and star Ice Cube isn't particularly interested in reinventing the wheel. The sequel to the 2002 hit brings back Sean Patrick Thomas, Eve, Troy... 
Twenty-four years ago, well-known American sportscaster Al Michaels uttered a line for the sports history books: "Do you believe in miracles? Yes!" This instantly quotable exhortation had its genesis... 
This god-awful comedy rips off the classic Tootsie up and down, Southern accent and all, in a particularly egregious and shameless manner. It's enough to make Kevin Pollak scream, "Somebody kill me!"... 
You got served (yoo got sûrvd) Slang.1. You have been presented with a defeat at the hands of others. 2. You have been made to watch a bad, feature-length music video.In olden days (the 1980s), brea... 
Win a Date with Tad Hamilton! is sweet and cute and amusing, as well as derivative, unexceptional, and highly unlikely. Let's give it a draw and call it a mostly unoffensive diversion about the etern... 
In his greatly promising debut feature The Station Agent, writer-director Thomas McCarthy tells a simple story with a rare gentleness which most audiences will find surprisingly life-like. McCarthy l... 
Norman Jewison's The Statement, adapted by Ronald Harwood from the
Brian Moore novel, unfolds a taut opening sequence, then slowly slackens
into a repetitive torpor. Early buzz pegged The Statement... 
Along Came Polly is a typical modern comedy of catastrophe, seasoned with scatological humor (the BBC's The Office has recently reminded us that poo is not the height of embarrassment, but the movies... 
... 
Watching Monster brought to mind John Cleese's lament in 1985's Clockwise: "It's not the despair...I can stand the despair. It's the hope." In telling the story of recently executed killer Aileen Wuo... 
By framing his latest film with black-and-white Warner Brothers logos, Clint Eastwood correctly implies that Mystic River is a classical film noir. Like Dennis Lehane's exceptional novel, Eastwood's... 
Aki Kaurismäki's much-awarded The Man Without a Past (2002 Grand Jury Prize winner at Cannes) will certainly be too drily quirky for some tastes, but it is a comedy for grown-ups, and for that w... 
Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World--based on the 20-novel naval adventure series by Patrick O'Brian--plays to director Peter Weir's strengths. The man who made Gallipoli and The Mosquito... 
Peter Mullan's The Magdalene Sisters is a scathing indictment of the sins of the Sisters of Magdalene Order, and by extension, all unholy acts ever committed in the name of religion. In one of the fi...
Peter Jackson opens The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King with the regarding of a worm. Pulling back and racking focus, Jackson reveals a hook. With the final part of a what amounts to a singl... 
Barking up the right tree, our favorite hangdog is back. The one-of-a-kind Bill Murray, the charm-oozing, heavy-lidded king of bemused deadpan, seems only to improve with age. Under the preternatural... 
I don't know what I wanted from a movie called The Last Samurai starring Tom Cruise. Maybe I just wanted it not to exist. But it does. It exists and exists and exists. Director Edward Zwick has made... 
By all rights, Jim Sheridan's In America--the fictionalized version of Sheridan's own immigration with his family in the 1980s--should be branded with a scarlet "S" for sappy, but somehow the man get... 
When Girl With a Pearl Earring opens, the titular heroine is peeling an onion. In its appropriate but somewhat obvious application, the image represents the film, but novice filmmaker Peter Webber ma... 
The revitalization of traditional genre films requires the touch of an accomplished artist. With her new film In the Cut, Jane Campion lends her distinctive voice to the mystery-thriller, creating a... 
The protagonist of Carlos Reygadas's Japón quietly embodies the punchline to the old joke Woody Allen quotes--as a metaphor for life--in Annie Hall: "Two elderly women are at a Catskill Mounta... 
I've come to accept what some people see in Northfork, but as the credits rolled, you couldn't have convinced me that anyone anywhere would ever really want to watch it. Sanity returned, as I remembe...
Amores Perros (Love's a Bitch) was the International Critics' Week Grand Prize Winner at Cannes, the twice-screened, twice sold-out closing night showcase for Cinequest, and Mexico's nominee for Best... 
When Sam Raimi brought Spider-Man, at long last, to the big screen, he brought with it that character's lower-middle-class roots. Marvel Comics maven Stan Lee, like Raimi, knew that readers might enj... 
David Cronenberg's Spider begins with a credit sequence of paint-peeling images suggesting a Rorshach test, followed by a prolonged, unsettling tracking shot the once and future Master of Suspense su... 
Where to begin describing Bad Company? From producer Jerry Bruckheimer's Office of Demographics comes, ostensibly, another well-reasoned packaging of a star twosome (typically, a white man and a blac... 
Following on the heels of British stage director Sam Mendes (now an Oscar-winning film director of American Beauty), British stage director Stephen Daldry offers up his debut feature Billy Elliot, an... 