The life of David Gale and the movie The Life of David Gale take many twists and turns. I can't reveal the nature of the former--except to say that the movie-hinging twist is fatally evident in the f... 
The Quiet American--the timely 2002 adaptation of Graham Greene's 1955 novel--is a film for grown-ups. A caustic critique of European colonialism and American cowboy politics in Vietnam, The Quiet Am... 
Old School is the sort of bad movie which constantly threatens to turn into something good, mostly on the strength of a few talented actors. Here, those actors are Luke Wilson, Will Ferrell, and Vinc... 
No one over the age of 12 takes seriously sequels to Disney's animated classics. Though hardly a world-beater, last year's Peter Pan sequel Return to Never Land proved a surprisingly endearing except... 
A modest but bubbly comedy of manners, How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days runs with a cockeyed but clever cross-purposes premise too gratifying to damn with anything other than faint praise. The romantic c... 
People persist in calling Jackie Chan a bad actor, but I have to disagree. True, the transplanted, mealy-mouthed Hong Kong star doesn't hurdle the language barrier as deftly as a physical one. But ev... 
A cookie-cutter rip-off of The Fast and the Furious, Biker Boyz likewise takes its inspiration from an article (Michael Gougis's "Biker Boyz," published in the New Times). It likewise motors along wi... 
In the 70s, Chuck Barris was killing us softly with his gong. Or so said the cultural critics of the time. Surprisingly, the game show entrepeneur who created The Gong Show and The Dating Game, among... 
Short of the mock-snuff of exploitation cinema and unsanctioned films about religion, no greater taboo exists today than stories which might dare to humanize Hitler. The furor over the fuhrer attends... 
Something about the underdog, "B"-movie spirit of Darkness Falls made me want to like it. At the outset, a burst of smart production value leaning on practical and sound effects to create shadowy hor... 
The best kept secret of modern American movies is Mormon cinema. In the last few years, Mormon films have begun squeezing into multiplexes for blink-and-you-miss-'em runs backed by grass-roots promot... 
The South Korean film Seom--finally receiving an American theatrical release, as The Isle, after two years--has some of the same demented cachet of Takashi Miike's Odishon (Audition) but little of it... 
Irvine Welsh's novel Trainspotting sparked a cult following, a film by Danny Boyle, and a subsequent cult of macho movie fans. Alan Warner's novel Morvern Callar rode that wave, as a grotty Scottish... 
Just what is the "guy thing" alluded to by Chris Koch's comedy A Guy Thing? Is it waking up next to a woman you met the night before at your bachelor party? Is it munching dry Count Chocula and hashi... 
It was only a matter of time before Jerry Bruckheimer finally cracked wide open the urban-kiddie-mafia-marsupial-action-comedy genre he's always coveted so much. Today, the urban-kiddie-mafia-marsupi... 
National Security is a soul-crushing invariant on the black-white buddy-cop movie. Even the nominally stimulating effects--Martin Lawrence, Steve Zahn, and lots of improbably leaping vehicles--fail t... 
Just Married, a time-and-space-inverted rehash of The Out-of-Towners, is the sort of cartoon comedy that--in spite of its lush international settings--takes place strictly in Movieland. Penned by the... 
Charlie Kaufman--the mad genius of screenwriting for the new millennium--had a problem: how to adapt Susan Orlean's The Orchid Thief, a novel lacking in the clean, easy lines of conventional narrativ... 
As poetic as mainstream cinema gets, Stephen Daldry's meticulous realization of The Hours beautifully delineates the intersection of life and art as a nexus for meaning, especially for the drifting a... 
Beginning with an adrenaline-pumped chase, Joe Carnahan's Narc announces its true grit as a cop movie. What follows--laden with well-worn archetypes but equally stained with a relentless disgorgement... 
Steven Spielberg's Catch Me If You Can--the tale of the invention of a self-made con-man--could be the projection of its maker's inner workings. Could the self-portrait of America's alpha filmmaker b... 
After the overwrought excess of Baz Luhrmann's redefinition of the movie musical (Moulin Rouge), the mere freneticism of Miramax's adaptation of Chicago comes as a breath of fresh air. Chicago may tr... 
Based on Ethan Canin's short story "The Palace Thief," The Emperor's Club happily reunites the dynamic duo of director Michael Hoffman and perenially underrated star Kevin Kline. Hoffman stepped in w... 
A visual marvel packed with futurist invention and fueled with moral ambiguity, Minority Report is a twin genre companion piece (science fiction and hard-boiled noir) to the science fiction meets fai... 
The film Antwone Fisher, in real life, represents opportunity--for its titular subject, who turned his life into the screenplay of a major motion picture--for Derek Luke, who makes his screen debut a... 
The official story of Walt Disney, the genius, and it's surely a story worth telling. 
Subtitled Three Portraits, Personal Velocity tells three thematically related stories of women making personal discoveries. Though their stories intersect by only the thinnest narrative filament, wri... 
Empire telegraphs trouble to the audience from its directorial credit in the opening minutes of the film: "directed by Franc.Reyes." This hubristic punctuation comes to no good end. To his credit, Re... 
A feel-good movie which elevates a servile woman to the level of the beautiful people, where she finds romance with the great man she serves? Is this really 2002? At least Julia Roberts's gentry-pleb... 
Like a local Haunted House attraction, XXX leaps out at you, makes loud noises, and plops your hand in the proverbial plate of cold spaghetti "guts." Superficially, it resembles exhilarating action f... 
Didn't Steven Soderbergh used to be the guy who figuratively told us that the Tinseltown emperor had no clothes? With Soderbergh's science-fiction remake Solaris coming back-to-back with the soggy se... 
Though its hardly a new observation, Analyze That, more than any other Robert De Niro film, invites the speculation that the once-revered actor has become the gimmicky comic screenwriter's whipping b... 
At one point in Disney's animated revamp of Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island—now dubbed Treasure Planet to fit its intergalactic milieu—one of the characters comments, "No tricks.... 
Though the 20th James Bond movie has plenty going for it, it's some measure of the franchise's long-winded fatigue that Die Another Day had me thinking, "Okay, fine, but let's call it a day now, shal... 
Amidst the emotional climax of the global tragedy Daughter from Danang, Vietnamese-American Heidi Bub expounds, "Sometimes I wish I could turn back the clock and not know any of this." The "can of wo... 
The long-struggling independent film Tully—once called The Truth About Tully after the O. Henry winning short story which inspired it—gently rolls over the audience like wind on crops, bu... 
El Crimen del Padre Amaro—that is, The Crime of Father Amaro—fairly defines cinematic provocation with its tale of corrupt and sexually active priests. In its native Mexico, the film brok... 
For a great documentary, Standing in the Shadows of Motown is deceivingly messy. Like its septuagenarian heroes, the film may shamble and bow and creak, but it also delivers—when it counts&mdas... 
Michael Caton-Jones's City By the Sea has the markings of a film that "could have been," but despite creative obstacles, Caton-Jones rallies his cast—including award-winners Robert De Niro, Fra... 
Writer-director Mark Romanek's One Hour Photo updates the psycho stalker picture for the new milennium. The genre which reached its height in the early nineties, when otherwise legitimate directors l... 