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... 
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... 
Those wondering why someone with the money and resources of Friends star Matthew Perry wouldn't spend them to commission and develop good screenplays have since learned that Perry had other things on... 
Walter Hill's Undisputed is silly, underdeveloped, and predictable. It's also pretty darn entertaining in a knowingly B-movie way. Everything in the movie points the way to a pulp-beating matchup of... 
Despite his Mormon background, writer-director Neil LaBute has made a name for himself as somewhat of an heir to David Mamet with his theatrically tough dialogue and unblinking themes. With Possessio... 
When setting out to make yet another Movieland satire, it's best to have an angle and, better, some fresh ideas. Luckily, writer-director Andrew Niccol--with his cult-of-celebrity fantasia Simone--ha... 
In Michael Winterbottom's 24 Hour Party People, the great DP Robby Müller starts from a murky place drained of color to represent Manchester, England. But as the film manically evokes the stirrings o... 
With clever writing and direction, the looseness afforded by shooting digital, and crack performances, Tadpole overcomes its essential slightness to become an amusingly cheery comedy about miserable... 
"There are three sides to every story: yours...mine...and the truth. No one is lying." Like the best-selling non-fiction book, the documentary The Kid Stays in the Picture opens with Robert Evans's d... 
The comic actor of the moment hit it big on Saturday Night Live with a panoply of memorable personas, floundered in film, then made a huge comeback with a showcase of crazy accented characters. That... 
Jennifer Aniston's latest attempt at a big-screen breakthrough is all about escape, which is appropriate for an actress staring down a ninth and final season on the image-defining hit sitcom Friends....
Rivers and Tides is an extraordinary documentary about landscape sculptor Andy Goldsworthy. German director Thomas Riedelsheimer followed Goldsworthy for over a year as he used leaves, stones, twigs,... 
Steven Soderbergh reportedly now disdains Sex, Lies, and Videotape, but to brave Full Frontal--Soderbergh's strenuously self-reflexive "sequel in spirit" to that breakthrough feature--is to fall in l... 
Sandra Goldbacher's Me Without You might just as well have been named Co-Dependency: The Movie. Detailing the shifting fortunes of two "friends for life," the film spans decades--the nostalgia-ready... 
The title of Zhang Yimou's Happy Times is, at least in part, ironic in its split-level look at modern Chinese society. The title may also suggest a kinship with Chaplin's Modern Times, which its gent... 
When the seemingly humble comedy feature Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery tanked and slinked out of theatres, few foresaw that the movie would launch the franchise to define cinematic come... 
Bondian superpies and cat-stroking villains haven't been fresh parodic targets for decades now, but Mike Myers--through force of comic talent--parlayed Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery int... 
Gangster No. 1 is yet another brutal, sick, and funny U.K. gangland import hopped up on technique. Here is the familiar arch use of lounge pop to contrast unfathomably bloody violence; there is the s...
"Out" director Stanley Kwan shot his underground Chinese romantic melodrama Lan Yu illegally, and it's anyone's guess if the film will ever play in a Chinese cinema. With its taboo homosexual coupling... 
At the core of Jacques Audiard's unusual Read My Lips is a basic heist genre yarn. Over that chewy candy center are the multiple layers of two distinctively down-and-out characters: a put-upon secret... 
Finally, someone's taken Haley Joel Osment down a peg. Let's see him explain the animatronic mammalian, psychedelic, pizza-with-anchovies nightmare that is The Country Bears to Inside the Actor's Stu... 
Despite being an opulent production that's partly a conservative salute to the noble duty an armed force owes to its country, K-19: The Widowmaker is likely far too discomfiting for most American aud... 
The Iranian films that make their way into our cinemas tend to have a neo-realist formality to them, usually depicting the ravages of poverty, basic human feeling, and the emotional wake which follow... 
If I were to give a "State of the Movies" address, I'd like to be able to say that creativity remained an important part of the process, but (sigh) Hollywood producers seem intent on making us movie... 
I think Woody Allen will have to die before I'll be able to accept, much less welcome, his many imitators. Of the many blatant attempts to ape Allen's style or thematic obsessions, only Rob Reiner's... 
Listen, Reign of Fire—the preeminent post-apocalyptic dragon picture—makes a terrible film. But I'd be lying if I said it didn't make a darn diverting movie. This is the kind of movie tha... 
With Lovely and Amazing, writer-director Nicole Holofcener offers a clever and funny riff on self-esteem and the family dynamic. The planned accidents which comprise the story--and the fine ensemble... 
Stuart Little 2 is liable to immediately put you into a good mood. As director Rob Minkoff (The Lion King) once more pushes in on his mostly idyllic, colorful, Sesame Street-esque New York, we listen... 
Sunny and colorful at heart and in its eye-catching visuals, Stuart Little updates (very freely) E.B. White's book, but the tone is so guilelessly sweet and the details so smartly steered to modern c... 
Steve Irwin a.k.a. The Crocodile Hunter a.k.a. Serious Yahoo came to prominence on television, hosting various incarnations of his confrontational animal-wrangling derring-do. His TV presence is, I s... 
Charlotte Gray is one of those odd-duck historical fiction films that ignores the scintillating truth and instead spins a frustrating web of simplistic half-truths. With the appropriate panache, audi... 
In the period surrounding the fall of Saigon in 1975, American soldiers routed waves of Vietnamese refugees into orientation camps. There, fledgling immigrants poised on an uneasy border, unsure if t... 
Men in Black II, unsurprisingly, lacks the joyful inventiveness of the original. Conventional wisdom dictates that sequels are not meant to be inventive; instead, they are exercises in maintenance. O... 
You may have heard that A Walk to Remember is a pleasant antidote to postmodern teen flicks and gross-out "romantic" comedies. For much of its running time, this assessment is accurate...which makes... 