The much-awarded German drama Nowhere in Africa--Oscar's Best Foreign Film for 2003--deserves kudos for bringing to cinematic light yet another intriguing perspective on the displacement of the World... 
The Vin Diesel vehicle A Man Apart recalls the scores of generic actioners of the '80s--the muscle-bound good guy pushed over the edge takes on the drug trade which cost him his a) partner, b) wife,... 
In a piece I wrote over a decade ago, I ridiculed Hollywood's obsession with remaking Die Hard, as in "Die Hard on a cruise ship" (Under Siege). I extrapolated the idea of Die Hard on a bus, which ca... 
Diverting but disturbing, Eddie Griffin's stand-up concert film DysFunktional Family frequently feels wrong. Displaying little of the finesse of the best concert films, DysFunktional Family affords c... 
The film adaptation of Stephen King's 800-page tome Dreamcatcher might more aptly be named Dreamsieve, for all the command it has over image and idea. Sprawlingly incoherent, Dreamcatcher trawls the... 
To advertise the ballsy bloodsport The Hunted as the product of an Academy Award-winning director (William Friedkin) and two Academy Award-winning actors (Tommy Lee Jones and Benicio Del Toro) is to... 
All film distributors--especially the independent ones--now pine for the next My Big Fat Greek Wedding, a sleeper hit wielding gentle comedy and big emotion. Fox Searchlight Pictures may have what th... 
The Core opens with a burst of cheesy zeal; we burrow under the Para-mountain to the deliciously overwrought music of Christopher Young. When the earth's core stops spinning, we go topside to see inn... 
Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd, Marx, Allen, Brooks. Writing-performing comedy auteurs. Is it me or has it been a while since Hollywood has welcomed a comedy auteur to get down to business? Steve Martin and... 
Basic is the sort of calendar-filling misfire that clogs resumes and sits on video store shelves. The hint of something more ambitious lies under the egomaniacal star turns and a convoluted screenpla... 
For a while, Tears of the Sun seems as if it might be subversive in its anti-heroics, fronted by the iconic, scowling chrome dome of Bruce Willis. Instead, Antoine Fuqua plays jack of all trades--nam... 
It's tempting to mimimize Gus Van Sant's experimental indie Gerry by dubbing it The Slow Walker (as opposed to last year's The Fast Runner) or perhaps Rosencranz and Guildenstern are Lost or even Dud... 
Like Robert Altman's appropriation of the Raymond Carver ouevre for the film Short Cuts, Rose Troche's The Safety of Objects imaginatively weaves together the pieces of A. M. Homes's short story coll... 
With irresistible technique, the ring of truth, and sheer force of will, Brazil's City of God announces itself to America as the picture to beat in 2003. Adapted by Bráulio Mantovani from Paul... 
Like My Big Fat Greek Wedding, Real Women Have Curves taps into a desire for sweet entertainment throwing back to seemingly more innocent times. Real Women Have Curves also speaks to two cultures und... 
On viewing All the Real Girls, I could only conclude that it is, at least partly, brilliant. Director David Gordon Greene, in the press notes to his sophomore follow-up to the much-praised patience-t... 
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... 
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 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 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... 