Clint Eastwood's film of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil shares with its bestselling source material a wealth of history, and an inherent confusion of fact and fiction. Eastwood lays an under... 
Alfred Hitchcock's classic Rear Window is perhaps Hitch's most purely perfect film. It packs in the popcorn thrills, a great Jimmy Stewart performance, and a subtle internal deconstruction of the fil... 
Tim Burton has proven his enormous talent as a filmmaker with the strikingly, cartoony, horrific, skewed, and often silly images which populate his universe. But for a filmmaker with such an attracti... 
A young boy helps an outcast protagonist find a place in the world and a fresh opportunity for a meaningful life. It's the plot of many a film, including Sling Blade, by writer-director-star-Oscar ba...
The words that often strike dread into the hearts of literature lovers are "Inspired by." After all, films that are "based on" books often bear little enough resemblance to their sources. But "inspire... 
While modest in means, Bedrooms and Hallways is a terribly clever comedy of manners conspiring to blur the lines of sexual orientation. Director Rose Troche (Go Fish) runs with Robert Farrar's invent... 
Le Placard (The Closet) is a typically high-concept French farce--of exactly the type that Hollywood regularly cannibalizes for English-language remakes. In this case, that might not be such a bad i... 
After a prolonged bout of flailing and despite being an original Woody Allen confection, The Curse of the Jade Scorpion falls, finally, flat. One of Allen's nouveau lightweight comedies, Scorpion tak... 
Despite sometimes lamenting the output, film fans have been offered a pretty good variety of quality films touching on the gay and lesbian experience. Highlighting that point is the arrival of a new... 
Coming out of a dismal movie summer, the first taste of fall is like manna from heaven—in contrast, that is. Directed by Scott Hicks (Shine), adapted by William Goldman, and starring Anthony Ho... 
Jane Austen-philes may get a larf out of Bridget Jones's Diary, the new film "based on" Helen Fielding's hit novel. The film is helmed by Sharon Maguire, who modelled one of Fielding's FOBs (friends... 
On the Hollywood scene, Steven Spielberg's A.I.: Artificial Intelligence has already been branded a failure where it really counts: at the box office. Such woes seem inevitable for a film that awkwar... 
Romantic with a capital "R," Anthony Minghella's filmed take on Charles Frazier's bestselling Cold Mountain has pictorial heft to spare but is slow to engage through character. It seems all too easy... 
The history of the world comes down to real estate: "highway robbery," coercive deals, conquering, planting flags, squatting. In various Holy Lands, men and women fight tooth and nail for what they b... 
As usual, Tim Burton's latest film is abundant in storytelling piquancy and deficient in storytelling proficiency. I love-hate Burton for his superior visual style and narrative blockheadedness--his... 
In the 101 years since Peter Pan's first, cameo appearance in a J.M. Barrie novel, no live-action sound feature has been made which, simply, tells the tale of Peter Pan. While a 1924 silent version h... 
In her best-selling social tract Reviving Ophelia, Mary Pipher asserts that "Parents know only too well that something is happening to their daughters. Calm, considerate daughters grow moody, demandi... 
Though I felt a wave of crankiness rolling back in after the cool breeze of Something's Gotta Give, I still had to hand it to writer-director Nancy Myers (What Women Want, Baby Boom). Myers attracted... 
The British comedy-drama Calendar Girls bears a fair comparison to The Full Monty, which ushered in a new era of cheeky lower-middle-class comedies of self-empowerment. The surprise of the film is th... 
It goes without saying that Mona Lisa Smile was pitched as a female take on Peter Weir's Dead Poets Society, but the new Julia Roberts vehicle has its own distinctive wrinkle. Set in the early '50s,... 
Watching the Las Vegas yarn The Cooler is like the tentative euphoria of watching a roulette ball, until it bounces from your winning slot to the one that spirits away your cash and your dreams. A vi...
Holiday moviegoers should be forewarned: The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, while not to be missed, requires an adjustment from its blockbuster predecessor, The Fellowship of the Ring. Decidely a...
When Peter Jackson decided to film J.R.R. Tolkien's epic fantasy tale The Lord of the Rings, he inherited a classic story and a brand name. But he also invited a hailstorm of challenges: a potentiall... 
What do Jim Carrey and Woody Allen have in common with Ben Stiller and Will Smith. Both were rumored pairings to star as the conjoined twins in the Farrelly Brothers' ultimate buddy picture Stuck on... 
Fairfield, California mother admits that her favorite book as a child was Cheaper by the Dozen, but only a supreme faith in humanity can explain the love and patience this mother of thirteen children... 
The way I see it, the sour Bad Santa has two comic assets (neither of which should be underestimated): a funny cast, headlined by Billy Bob Thornton, and more swearing than American cinema has heard... 
In his first English-language feature, 21 Grams, director Alejandro González Iñárritu choreographs the dread follies of life and death. The crushing import of life-blood and seme... 
I'm not sure what accounts for the bizarre nexus this year of Girls Will Be Girls and Die Mommie Die!, two drag homages to washed-up, boozy, drug-addled Hollywood royalty and the back-stabbing such q... 
When Ron Howard's version of The Alamo--set to star Russell Crowe--fell apart due to budget concerns, Howard licked his wounds and apparently told his agent, bring me the Western scripts. But just as... 
Nothing says "beware, moviegoers" like top billing for Paul Walker, Hollywood's favorite open-mouthed bass. Before he opens his prodigious aperture, Walker is the all-American hero-next-door: slight... 
I'm back with another critical rhyme.It's The Cat in the Hat with Mike Myers this time.Perhaps this is blasphemous, but I found it funny;For sure, it's a license to make and print money.For the most... 
Tupac: Resurrection makes for a solid documentary about an enduring and controversial artist. Though insular and limited like its stylistic forebear The Kid Stays in the Picture (about Hollywood prod... 
They say nothing succeeds like success, which partly explains the meteoric rise of journalists like Jayson Blair and Stephen Glass. Their flashy but callow, mendacious mediocrity led each to a new le... 
It's some measure of writer-director Richard Curtis's sheer force of will with Love Actually that while I harbor serious doubts that it's a good movie, I feel compelled to award it a qualified recomm... 
The Matrix Reloaded--the brain-fried sequel to The Matrix--raised plenty of questions earlier this year. The purported final chapter to The Matrix trilogy--The Matrix Revolutions--answers only one of... 
Were it not for Oscar-caliber talent in front of the camera, Radio would be a straight-to-PAX-TV movie. To some, perhaps that is a selling point. As an uplifting, PG-rated sports drama, Radio will al... 
When I said, "I'd watch Gene Hackman read the phone book," I didn't mean it literally, and yet, here we have Runaway Jury, an insultingly dumb "legal" thriller adapted by four screenwriters from John... 
With Veronica Guerin, producer Jerry Bruckheimer and director Joel Schumacher efficiently embalm their titular heroic martyr. A true story told in the language and at the speed of a Hollywood thrille... 
As usual, the Coen Brothers are so damn clever. The gang's all here, from composer Carter Burwell to cinematographer Roger Deakins to fictional editor Roderick Jaynes (a pseudonym for the writer-dire... 
For the benefit of the uninitiated, Jack Black is a force of nature. The Tenacious D rocker and film-starring funnyman is a one-man band who makes his music with a bizarre patois of nicknames and eup... 