There's no denying that there's something quaintly appealing about Secondhand Lions, a family film that plays like a slow skim through a Boy's Life magazine. Unfortunately, writer-director Tim McCanl... 
If Matchstick Men doesn't quite reach a level of stylish substance, it at least achieves substantive style. In more cutesy directorial hands and with lesser acting talent, Matchstick Men might be eas... 
A run-of-the-mill feel-dumb comedy, Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star takes a potentially funny (if dangerously played-out) premise and grinds it into Saturday Night Live-movie mulch. Early in this D... 
Jackie Chan fans (like myself) are bound to feel more of the aging action star's growing pains than usual this time around. The Medallion, a cheap-feeling, English-language hybrid of American dollars... 
What Cabin Fever lacks in discipline, it makes up for in squirmy fun. A creepy-crawly nightmare at turns laughable and genuinely disturbing, Cabin Fever might be, superficially, a bad movie, but prac... 
The love-child of M*A*S*H and Catch-22, Gregor Jordan's Buffalo Soldiers continually promises to erupt, but when it does, it does so not into full-bore satire but rather plot-satisfying theatrics. Th... 
Based on a manga by Kazuo Koike and Kazuo Kamimura, The Princess Blade is one of the self-serious HK martial arts flicks (as opposed to the goofy, knowingly self-parodic ones). That would be fine, if... 
It's a measure of Kevin Costner's bizarre instincts (or perhaps his own internal range-war of art vs. commerce) that the death of a dog is given more emotional weight than the death of a man in his n... 
Uptown Girls is a daddy's-little-princess movie with two dead daddies and two psychologically damaged princesses. Nevertheless, director Boaz Yakin keeps the tone consistently zany, escorting stars B... 
It's tempting to give Passionada a pass for what it gets right, but this otherwise unassuming film--which aspires to old-fashioned Hollywood charm--has an albatross around the neck of its typically c... 
Writer-director Aleksandr Rogozhkin says of his film Cuckoo "We have not had a cinema of this kind before," which is a bit misleading and a trifle hyperbolic. Jumping off from the notion of the Tower... 
The long-awaited Freddy vs. Jason is an endlessly bizarre movie-going experience. At war with itself, this missive from the slasher-movie afterlife represents a collision of two separate and unequal... 
Camp is a bit ragged around the edges, sometimes as awkward as its emotionally needy characters, and generally scattershot and shticky. But it's just so cute. Inspired by his experiences as a camper... 
Though Robert Rodriguez wisely and admirably puts a boy and a girl front and center in his Spy Kids franchise, Spy Kids 2: The Island of Lost Dreams is--at heart--a boy's playground romp digitally re... 
Alan Rudolph has been celebrated--and much maligned--for his idiosyncratic style. A Robert Altman disciple, Rudolph favors a loose, improvisational approach with each actor wired for sound and a lack... 
Simon West's dispiriting Lara Croft: Tomb Raider squandered the opportunity to create a classy, new, female-headlined action franchise. Instead, it merely created a new, female-headlined action franc... 
In most respects, Bad Boys II improves upon its generic predecessor Bad Boys. But the casual misanthropy and aggressive "humor" cancel out the up-shifted action and newfound confidence, making Bad Bo... 
Bad Boys is an '80s buddy-cop movie dressed up in slicker, pricier '90s hyper-style. The glossy cinematic calling card for director Michael Bay and then-TV-stars Will Smith and Martin Lawrence, Bad B...
With the recent memory of the U.S. government arguably acting against the will--or at least the judgment--of the American people, Sam Green & Bill Siegel's documentary The Weather Underground carr... 
Rowan Atkinson is known to TV audiences as the Black Adder and Mr. Bean, and to movie audiences for his theatrical reprise Bean and supporting roles in Four Weddings and a Funeral and The Tall Guy. W... 
In one of several cagey evocations of the famed Disneyland ride "Pirates of the Caribbean," Gore Verbinski's Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl includes an image of three hanging... 
Before his death in 1998, the master director Akira Kurosawa made thirty films, and yet legions of film fans--including those working in the industry--hunger for more. The 1999 film Ame Agaru (After... 
It's odd that DreamWorks can't seem to get its animated act together. Since 1998—when Antz and The Prince of Egypt shot out of the proverbial corporate cannon (with a battle cry of "Take that,... 
The Legend of Suryothai is neither a thoughtful film nor a dramatic one. If you go, you go for the elephants and palanquins, the poisonings and beheadings, the sets and the costumes. It is with these... 
It's tempting to judge the Charlie's Angels movies more for what they aren't than what they are. What they aren't: feminist action-comedies. What they are: unprecedentedly overblown action-burlesques... 
Well-acted all around, Jed Weintrob's On_Line invades the playground of webcam pornography sites (and webheads who use their computers as video phones) and discovers that real human beings are far mo... 
A powerful and well-acted tale of irrepresible female leadership, Whale Rider retells--for modern times--a Maori legend. Adapted from Witi Ihimaera's novel The Whale Rider, Niki Caro's film capitaliz... 
Hollywood Homicide is a silly lark, one's affection for star Harrison Ford and director Ron Shelton (like mine) or for Josh Hartnett (like millions of females) notwithstanding. At best, Hollywood Hom... 
Rugrats Go Wild refers not to a Mardi Gras vacation caught on videotape, but the historic collision of TV's Rugrats with TV's The Wild Thornberrys. The Wild Thornberrys made their big screen debut la... 
The Eye begins with a jolting stunt and an admonition to "SIT TIGHT..." Shortly thereafter, a young heroine tells us, in voice-over, "Some people say this world is ugly, but it is beautiful at the sa... 
Discriminating moviegoers, take note. Though Tsui Hark's Vampire Hunters (a.k.a. The Era of Vampire) opens in Bay Area theatres this week, it hits video shelves only eleven days later from Columbia-T... 
Emanuele Crialese has a gift for making images speak louder than words. In his achingly beautiful film Respiro, Crialese paints pregnant pictures. Early in the film, he shows us a mother and her chil... 
Coming as it does on the heels of his widely panned American erotic thriller Killing Me Softly, Chen Kaige's Together will represent for some a further "selling out" to American cultural tastes. Like... 
A Mighty Wind represents an intriguing development of Christopher Guest's mockumentary style. The recipe remains the same: round up the usual suspects--a friendly group of skilled improvisers and tal... 
Despite being the winner of eight Icelandic Academy Awards, Hafið (The Sea) fails to generate much interest. This umpteenth variation on Shakepeare's King Lear might have worked if its melodrama... 
With the wholly engrossing documentary Spellbound (punny title duly noted), Jeffrey Blitz savvily covers the 1999 National Spelling Bee--a.k.a. the 72nd Annual Scripps-Howard Spelling Bee--by necessa... 
Matt Dillon's City of Ghosts could just as easily have gone to the cable graveyard. Dillon's debut as director and screenwriter (with Barry Gifford) has the familiarly haphazard feel of a director tr... 
One poster on IMDB raved about The Trip, "If you like Will and Grace you'll love The Trip," which sounds about right, though it's hardly a ringing endorsement. Writer-director Miles Swain uneasily bl... 
Richard Kwietniowski's atmospheric Owning Mahowny does for gambling addiction--in a minor key--what Days of Wine and Roses did for alcoholism. In concert with quintessential schlub Philip Seymour Hof... 
With his assured directorial debut The Dancer Upstairs, celebrated actor John Malkovich slyly comments on the artistry inherent in fields divergent from his own: dance, politics, terrorism. Centrally... 