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Taking Woodstock In a sense, then, the film is at its best when it’s playing time machine, transporting us back to a seminal moment when everything seemed possible. Lee has already proved that he has a keen eye ... Tales From the Darkside: The Movie [DVD] Tales From the Darkside: The Movie is one of the last of the horror anthology movies to come out of the 1980s, following Creepshow (1982) and Creepshow 2 (1987), The ... Talk to Her (Hable con ella) For more than a decade, Spanish writer/director Pedro Almodóvar has specialized in making the bizarre poignant, and in Talk to Her (Hable con ella), he has developed his most richly ... Targets [DVD] Peter Bogdanovich was a film critic and writer for Esquire when low-budget producer Roger Corman asked him to make his first feature film. Bogdanovich had less than a month and $125,000 to ... Tarzan Consider the following passage from Edgar Rice Burroughs' 1912 pulp classic,"Tarzan of the ... Tarzan and the Lost City Unfortunately, it's not bad in the way great, colossal misfires like "Heaven's Gate" (1980) or "Ishtar" (1987) are bad. Instead, it literally drips off the screen like a movie nobody wanted to be ... Taxi Driver In "Taxi Driver," Scorsese exposes the underbelly of New York through Vietnam veteran Travis Bickle (De Niro), a loner who is unable to comprehend the society he lives in. His is the epitome of ... Team America: World Police [DVD] Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the juvenile masterminds behind South Park, evoke the horrors of a world gone mad for laughs in an action film populated entirely with marionette puppets, ... Tears of the Sun Antoine Fuqua’s Tears of the Sun is a deeply confused film. On the one hand, it is a harrowing, often brutally violent look at the ravages of civil war in the African nation of Nigeria, ... Tell No One (Ne le dis à personne) At its best, Tell No One keeps a number of possibilities in the air and maintains a genuine sense of mystery right up until the talking villain starts explaining everything in the final reel ... Tenacious D in The Pick of Destiny And that is precisely what they aim for in Tenacious D in The Pick of Destiny, and even when parts of it don’t quite work, you can’t blame them for trying. Black and Gass (who cowrote ... Tenebre [DVD] Tenebre marked Argento’s return to the giallo--hyperstylized mysteries obsessed with extended murder sequences and bizarre psychoses--after making the supernatural horror films ... Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines When people think of the Terminator films, the first things that come to mind are big action and big special effects. Even though James Cameron’s 1984 original was a fairly low-budget ... Terminator Salvation Having temporarily set aside his cape and cowl, The Dark Knight’s Christian Bale brings his trademark vigor and intensity to the role of John Connor, the resistance leader about whom so ... Terms of Endearment [DVD] In the introduction to the paperback edition of Terms of Endearment, author Larry McMurtry noted that he wrote the novel after having spent a couple of years rereading several 19th-century ... Testament [DVD] Not surprisingly, then, these fears worked their way into popular culture, particularly movies. In 1983, there was a rash of such films, including WarGames, a teen thriller that posited the ... Texasville With vivid color photography in contrast to the stark black and white of its prequel, "The Last Picture Show," "Texasville" is both a funny and a sad look at contemporary small town life during the ... Thank You for Smoking That man is Nick Naylor, who is played with smarmy confidence and square-jawed conviction by Aaron Eckhart. Naylor is a vice-president of the Academy for Tobacco Studies, which is nothing more than ... That Hamilton Woman [DVD] That Hamilton Woman also benefits from some particularly canny casting by Hungarian émigré-turned-megaproducer and director Alexander Korda, in this case Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh ... That Little Monster [DVD] Clocking in at just under an hour in length, Paul Bunnell's That Little Monster is a quirky little sci-fi/horror comedy about the perils of babysitting mutant babies. ... That Obscure Object of Desire (Cet obscur objet du désir) [DVD] Such is the case with the brilliantly subversive decision by Luis Buñuel to cast two women for one role in his final film, The Obscure Object of Desire (Cet obscur objet du désir). ... That Thing You Do! In his first stint in the director's chair, actor Tom Hanks has made a snappy little ode to a time when America was at a crossroads -- JFK had been assassinated but no one knew what Vietnam was yet. ... The 13th Warrior [DVD] When John McTiernan's "The 13th Warrior" finally arrived in theaters, it was plagued by rumors of reshoots, the title had undergone a major change, and it had been shelved for more than a year. ... The 40-Year-Old Virgin Andy is played by Steve Carell, the former Daily Show correspondent who has demonstrated an impressive comedic range in the last few years, playing a backstabbing jerk in Bruce ... The 400 Blows (Les quatre cents coups) [DVD] Famous last words, as they say. Truffaut took him up on his offer, and the result was The 400 Blows (Les quatre cents coups), a film that would forever change the landscape of not only ... The 6th Day The 6th Day is a science-fiction action extravaganza with some interesting ideas.The movie never really explores those ideas in any substantial depth, but they make for agood backbone to ... The A-Team When summer movies go bad--as last summer’s Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen did with such sledgehammer sound and fury--it can be the kind of experience that makes you regret the medium ... The Abominable Dr. Phibes [DVD] In Danse Macabre, a nonfiction study of the pleasures of horror, novelist Stephen King notes quite rightly and quite obviously that the one leveler, the one thing we all as human beings have ... The Abyss: Special Edition [DVD] One of the best films of 1989 was a film no one got to see: James Cameron's powerful underwater epic The Abyss. I say no one got to see it even though it was put into wide release in the ... The Accused [DVD] Jodie Foster, in her first Oscar-winning performance, plays Sarah Tobias, the victim. Not the kind of girl you take home to mother, Sarah is low-class, which makes it a more difficult case for ... The Adventures of Antoine Doinel: The 400 Blows, Antoine and Colette, Stolen Kisses, Bed and Board, Love on the Run [DVD] >Famous last words, as they say. Truffaut took him up on his offer, and the result ... The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert [DVD] The Adventures of Priscilla is a smartly made hybrid in more ways than one. It mixes comedy and drama and elements of the musical all within the well-worn generic terrain of the road movie. ... The Adventures of Rocky & Bullwinkle I have always found it slightly disconcerting to see familiar two-dimensional cartoon characters realized in flesh and blood. It is a popular trend, though, as the recent slew of ... The Alamo I grew up in San Antonio and spent countless Saturday afternoons as a child with my father downtown at the Alamo (the mission church, which has been heavily rebuilt over the years, is the only part ... The Amityville Horror (1979) [DVD] Like William Friedkin's "The Exorcist" (1973), the film it is most obviously trying to emulate, "The Amityville Horror" is based on a supposedly true story. Of course, "The Exorcist" was taken from ... The Amityville Horror (2005) Right up until the gooey climax of the original 1979 film, screenwriter Sandor Stern had hemmed fairly closely to Jay Douglas’ supposedly nonfictional account of a young family terrorized for 28 ... The Apostle So it's not hard to see why it took Robert Duvall fifteen years to get "The Apostle" onto the big-screen. As a matter of fact, even after fifteen years he still never managed to get financial ... The Art of Amália Bruno de Almeida's The Art of Amália is a documentary about the extraordinary60-year career of the Portuguese singing sensation Amália Rodrigues, who died in October1999, a week ... The Art of War Despite being not much more than a typical action flick, "The Art of War" aspires to greaterheights by setting itself on a stage of international intrigue and dueling politics between theUnited ... The Astronaut's Wife [DVD] "The Astronaut's Wife" is essentially an inferior variation on "Rosemary's Baby" (1968) dolled up in modern science fiction drag. The same basic themes are there, the same essential fears--that ... The Atomic Submarine [DVD] The majority of the The Atomic Submarine takes place on the Tiger Shark, the underwater vessel of the title, which is sent on a mission to the Arctic Circle to uncover the mystery ... The Aviator In a dazzling display of cinematic metareflection so obvious that it is easy to overlook its genius, Scorsese and cinematographer Robert Richardson (Kill Bill) paint Hughes' cinematic ... The Bad Sleep Well (Warui yatsu hodo yoku nemuru) [DVD] In the 12th of his 16 legendary collaborations with Kurosawa, Toshirô Mifune, clean-shaven and wearing nerdish horn-rimmed glasses, plays Koichi Nishi, a seemingly mild-mannered young man who ... The Bakery Girl of Monceau (La Boulangère de Monceau) [DVD] This dilemma--a man choosing between two women--became the core of all of Rohmer’s “Moral Tales,â€� which makes The Bakery Girl of Monceau an extremely important film. Rohmer had already ... The Banger Sisters What happens when groupies grow up ... or don't? This is ostensibly the subject of writer/director Bob Dolman's The Banger Sisters, which stars the potentially crackerjack combo of Susan ... The Bank Dick [DVD] In his highly regarded essay "Comedy's Greatest Era," published in "Life" magazine in 1949, film critic James Agee wrote that W.C. Fields was the one great comedian to emerge out of the talkies. He ... The Bank Job My only question is: How has it taken this long for someone to make a movie about this fascinating real-life ... The Battle for Terra The story takes place in the distant future when the human race has depleted all the resources on Earth and, after having colonized and terraformed two other planets, went to war against themselves ... The Battle of Algiers (La Battaglia di Algeri) [DVD] Drawing from the socialist imperative best exemplified in the early works of Soviet directors like Sergei Eisenstein, Pontecorvo resists the urge to locate heroism in a single individual, instead ... The Beach [DVD] "The Beach" marks Leonardo DiCaprio's first leading role in more than two years, since the worldwide juggernaut that was "Titanic" (1997), and that alone invests the film with a certain interest ... The Beales of Grey Gardens [DVD] To capitalize on this re-energized fascination with the Beales, Albert Maysles (his brother passed away in 1987) has gone back to the original footage and culled together another 90-minute ... The Beastmaster (Special Divimax Edition) [DVD] So, here I am, some two decades later, looking at this film with a more experienced eye. There is no doubt that I still enjoy it immensely simply because I have such fond memories of it from ... The Beastmaster [DVD] Here is a quandary for me as a film critic -- a review of Don Coscarelli's 1982 sword-and-sorcery favorite The Beastmaster. The problem is this: When I was in fourth grade, this was my ... The Big Bounce Like Jack Ryan (Owen Wilson), its casually slacker protagonist, there is something almost too laid-back and slapdash about The Big Bounce, a crime-comedy based on the first novel by the ... The Big Hit Presumably, "The Big Hit" is an action-comedy, a difficult but not impossible genre to pull off. Movies of this sort require a fine balance and careful tone, and the comedy is usually meant to work ... The Big Lebowski In "The Big Lebowski," their first cinematic offering since the multiple Academy Award-winning "Fargo," the action takes place in Los Angeles during the Gulf War, and the hero of the story is Jeff ... The Black Cauldron With few exceptions, the overall grim tone of "The Black Cauldron" feels nothing like any other Disney movie. The movie's title alone is somewhat ominous, and it's a wonder Disney didn't use the ... The Black Dahlia Over the years there have been thousands of newspaper and magazine articles, countless books and novels, several movies, a video game, and even a 12-part symphonic suite composed by ... The Blair Witch Project There are so few movies nowadays that are worth talking about after you've left the theater. Too many movies are ephemeral--they simply dissolve and dissipate out of your mind even as the credits ... The Blind Side Thankfully, Hancock treads the line with grace and humanity, which allows him to take what could have been a cliché three-hanky tearjerker designed to assuage white guilt and turn it into something ... The Blob [DVD] During the Cold War 1950s, American cinema goers found cathartic release from the growing fear of the nuclear arms race in watching the U.S. being bombarded on-screen by threats generated by either ... The Book of Eli The postapocalyptic genre, with its dour terrain, physical hardships, and frequently nihilistic overtones, is tricky terrain for movie stars to inhabit: While the Mad Max films (1979-85) ... The Bourne Identity [Blu-Ray] The film is old-fashioned in the sense that it is an old-school spy thriller, in this case based on the best-selling 1980 novel by the late spy novelist Robert Ludlum. At the same time, though, it ... The Bourne Supremacy [Blu-Ray] In 2002’s The Bourne Identity, Jason Bourne was adrift in the world without any sense of who he was, and the movie tracked his quest to find out about his past. He did so with the help of ... The Bourne Ultimatum Our hero, Jason Bourne (Matt Damon), an amnesiac CIA assassin who has spent the previous two movies trying to figure out who he is, is still in the crosshairs of his former government employer, ... The Boy in the Striped Pajamas The story opens in Berlin in the early 1940s, where we meet Bruno (Asa Butterfield), a privileged 8-year-old whose father (David Thewlis) is an official in the Nazi party. Bruno doesn’t really ... The Brave One Foster plays Erica Bain, the host of a successful radio talk show in New York City. One night she and her fiancée, David Kirmani (Naveen Andrews), make the mistake of going through the wrong ... The Break-Up However, one has to ask: Did anyone bother reading the title? This is a story about a break-up, about two people who used to love each other but have found that they cannot live together anymore ... The Brothers Bloom We are introduced to the titular sibling con-man team of Stephen and Bloom as young orphans who plan an elaborate ruse to rob their small town’s overprivileged community of children. Although they ... The Brothers Grimm Simply put, Gilliam, the Monty Python alum and unruly auteur behind 12 Monkeys (1995), Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998), and, his most notoriously difficult production, ... The Brown Bunny Therefore, we can only assume that it is Vincent Gallo--and Vincent Gallo alone--who is responsible for The Brown Bunny being such a pretentious, silly bore of a would-be existential art ... The Browning Version [DVD] The story takes place over a few days, as Crocker-Harris prepares to leave his position at the school after 18 years. He has an unnamed illness that is forcing him to resign, but his imminent ... The Burning [DVD] By just about any measure, The Burning is not a particularly good film. As part of the deluge of slasher movies that followed in Friday the 13th's wake, there is little that causes it ... The Butterfly Effect In his first dramatic role, MTV and tabloid mainstay Ashton Kutcher drops his male bimbo persona and delves headfirst into the gloom and doom of The Butterfly Effect, playing Evan Treborn, a ... The Cars That Ate Paris [DVD] > Judging from the poster art and the title, if you had gone to see Peter ... The Cat's Meow There is virtually no chance that we will ever know what happened aboard the Oneida, media baron William Randolph Hearst's luxury yacht, on the night of November 18, 1924. We do know that a ... The Celebration (Festen) On paper, the tenets of Dogme 95 are preposterous and limiting. It is roughly the equivalent of allowing painters only the use of oil paints and a certain size canvas, or demanding that writers ... The Cell [DVD] "The Cell" takes an old science fiction trope--what if we could somehow enter into another person's subconscious--and uses it to explore that unique horror of the machine age: serial killing. And, ... The Children Are Watching Us (I bambini ci guardano) [DVD] So begins Vittorio De Sica’s The Children Are Watching Us (I bambini ci guardano), a precursor to Italian neorealism that relates the heart-breaking account of a family’s ... The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian [Blu-Ray] We are reintroduced to the four British siblings who were the heroes of the series’ first installment, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (2005): Peter (William Moseley), Susan (Anna ... The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe When C.S. Lewis wrote his seven-part series, which was roughly during the same period that fellow Oxford professor J.R.R. Tolkien was penning his fantasy trilogy, it was written as both a Christian ... The Chronicles of Riddick Not long after, he landed an iconic role in The Fast and the Furious (2001), and suddenly he was being branded the new action star of the new millennium. He pulled down a big, fat payday for ... The Church (La Chiesa) [DVD] The film opens during the Crusades, where a band of Teutonic knights slaughters an entire village of suspected witches and buries their bodies in a mass grave. In order to ward off their evil, a ... The Class (Entre les murs) [Blu-Ray] Novelist François Bégaudeau, who spent a year teaching in a similar school after graduating from college and wrote a book about his experiences, plays Mr. Marin, a loose version of himself. Mr. ... The Constant Gardener Ralph Fiennes plays Justin Quayle, a rather dull, midlevel British career diplomat assigned to a post in Kenya. When the film opens, he is seeing his wife, Tessa (Rachel Weisz), off at an airstrip, ... The Contender Writer/director Rod Lurie's The Contender is Mr. Smith Goes toWashington remade for the Clinton era. Both films feature idealist heroes who are facedwith an overpowering political ... The Conversation [DVD] Caul's profession is surveillance -- watching and recording other people. Even one of Caul's fiercest competitors (Allen Garfield) admits that he is "the best bugger on the West Coast." He is a ... The Core The Core is a delicious, absurdly retro sci-fi action yarn about a motley group of scientists and NASA pilots whose mission is to go the Earth’s core, set off a couple of nuclear bombs, and ... The Corporation [DVD] As a documentary polemic, it makes its strongest point near the beginning. At the end of the 19th century, lawyers exploited the vague language of the 14th Amendment to get corporations the same ... The Cotton Club [DVD] Francis Ford Coppola was the most critically and commercially successful director of the 1970s. His achievements in that single decade—The Godfather (1972), The Godfather Part II ... The Count of Monte Cristo The Count of Monte Cristo is a surprisingly effective throwback to the heyday of swashbuckling movie adventures and the pleasures of pulp-fiction-masquerading-as-great-literature (one might ... The Cranes Are Flying (Letjat zhuravli) [DVD] Director Mikhail Kalatozov and cinematographer Sergei Urusevsky (in the first of their four collaborations, the last of which was 1964's I Am Cuba) bring to The Cranes Are Flying an ... The Crazies [Blu-Ray] The underlying themes in The Crazies--distrust of those around us, the thin line between sanity and insanity, and the complementary terrors of organized versus hysterical violence--are potent ... The Crossing Guard [DVD] In Sean Penn's tortured revenge drama "The Crossing Guard," Jack Nicholson plays Freddy Gale, a man who has been waiting six years for the man who killed his seven-year-old daughter in a ... The Curious Case of Benjamin Button [Blu-Ray] In adapting the Fitzgerald story, screenwriter Eric Roth has essentially recycled his three-hanky, Oscar-winning approach to Forrest Gump (1994). All the important components are in place: We ... The Curse of the Fly [DVD] In this respect, some have complained that The Curse of the Fly is too slow-moving for its own good, but such complaints are rooted in expectations of immediate gratification. As a B-horror ... The Da Vinci Code The thing about the book that makes it so popular and controversial is Brown’s canny incorporation of history, theology, and ages-old conspiracy theories into a mystery-thriller, which makes ... The Darjeeling Limited The Darjeeling Limited tells the story of three estranged brothers--Francis (Owen Wilson), Peter (Adrien Brody), and Jack (Jason Schwartzman)--who reunite for a train trip across India. The ... The Dark Backward [DVD] But then, see, he starts to have this growth in the middle of his back. At first it's like a big bug bite, but then it starts to turn into this huge, painful lump, and then it sprouts--get ... The Dark Knight Scripted by Nolan and his brother Jonathan, The Dark Knight is laced with the depths of thematic aspiration that can catapult a summer tentpole into the realms of the mythic. So many films ... The Day After Tomorrow [DVD] The first film was Emmerich’s big breakthrough, Independence Day (1996), in which most of Earth’s population was wiped out by a marauding alien force. The cataclysmic destruction in that ... The Day of the Locust [DVD] The 1970s was a period of great artistic freedom in Hollywood, when the major studios, in dire financial straits after a string of big-budget flops in the late 1960s, turned over the reins to young ... The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) [Blu-Ray] The story opens with a flying saucer arriving in Washington, D.C., landing in the middle of that great symbol of Americana--a baseball diamond--after flying past all of the capitol’s most ... The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008) The original film was, for its time, a ground-breaking mixture of the fantastical and the realistic, although said realism was conveyed primarily by documentary-like imagery and the inclusion of ... The Dead Zone [DVD] The Dead Zone was one of the earliest films to be adapted from a Stephen King novel (there have since been more than 50), yet in many ways its does not reflect the typically visceral horror ... The Deceivers [DVD] Through a contrived series of events, he witnesses the slaughter of a group of travelers by members of the Thugee, a secretive cult that worshipped Kali, the multi-armed Indian goddess of ... The Deep [Blu-Ray] By all accounts the production of The Deep went much more smoothly, but its challenges were still hyped via a prime-time network making-of special and enough press material to ensure that it ... The Departed Yes, Gangs of New York (2002), despite many good qualities, was a significant disappointment, if only because it had been gestating as Scorsese’s dream project for three decades. The ... The Descent It’s that kind of careful attention to the components of fear that sets Marshall’s work apart. Yet, for a horror film, one of the most impressive aspects of The Descent is the restraint ... The Devil Wears Prada [DVD] However, don’t take that to mean that The Devil Wears Prada was any less “high conceptâ€� than other summer movies. With its ties to a moderately scandalous bestselling novel, a ... The Devil's Own While it was in production, there were rampant rumors of ego wars between the two stars and endless script revisions, so severe that Pitt wanted to walk out because the working script bore little ... The Devil's Rejects Had The Devil’s Rejects been made back in the late 1960s, it would have been called a “roughieâ€� -- a particular brand of grindhouse exploitation fare that traded in wanton violence for ... The Devils "The Devils" is a spectacularly bad dramatic retelling of a forced witch trial in Loudon, France in 1634. The target of the inquisition was a priest named Urbain Grandier (Oliver Reed), who was ... The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie [DVD] Luis Buñuel's The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie is the kind of film that film critics and fans of Buñuel's distinct cinematic style love and most general audiences find confusing and ... The Diving Bell and the Butterly (Le Scaphandre et le papillon) Yet, American painter-turned-director Julian Schnabel has done something very close to miraculous in making Bauby’s predicament fundamentally cinematic. Working with cinematographer Janusz ... The Docks of New York [DVD] In his second collaboration with von Sternberg after the 1927 hit gangster film Underworld, the indomitable George Bancroft plays Bill Roberts, a tough-talking, hard-living man who earns his ... The Door in the Floor Jeff Bridges, perfectly channeling his shaggy-dog charm into a portrait of comfortable, well-worn arrogance, plays Ted Cole, a failed novelist who has since found success and wealth as an author ... The Double Life of Veronique (La Double vie de Véronique) [DVD] The story concerns two identical women (both played by Irène Jacob), one of whom lives in Poland and one of whom lives in France. They look exactly the same and share many similarities--a gift for ... The Dreamers The Dreamers takes place in Paris in 1968, a time of great social turmoil that was instigated by the government’s firing of the much revered Henri Langlois, the founder of the ... The Duellists [DVD] Bathed in an almost ethereal light, as if it were a moving painting by an Old Master, Ridley Scott's feature debut The Duellists tells the story of a 15-year feud between two very different ... The Dukes of Hazzard Taking the reins from comparatively clean-cut John Schneider and Tom Wopat, scruffy-looking Seann William Scott and Johnny Knoxville take over as, respectively, Bo and Luke Duke, a pair of ... The Earrings of Madame de ... [DVD] The earrings of the title are a gift from a general (Charles Boyer) to his younger wife, Louise (Danielle Darrieux), the Madame de … of the title (their last name is never explicitly stated, ... The Edge [Blu-Ray] With The Edge, directed by Lee Tamahori, Mamet takes two archetypes of male power and dumps them in the middle of the Alaskan wilderness, where they must fight the elements and, eventually, ... The Element of Crime (Forbrydelsens element) [DVD] Since his embrace of grainy, hand-held camerawork in 1996's "Breaking the Waves," Danish director Lars von Trier has gravitated more and toward a minimalist aesthetic. His 1998 film, "The Idiots" ... The Elephant Man [DVD] Whenever people write about The Elephant Man, the word dignity tends to be the central focus of their analysis. The film tells the true-life story of Joseph (John) Merrick, a young man ... The Emerald Forest [DVD] In The Emerald Forest, director John Boorman returns to the untamed wilds of nature in order to spin a mythic, violent fable about humankind's environmental destructiveness. ... The Emperor Jones [DVD] When we first meet Jones, he is admiring himself in a mirror, an act of self-adulation that is central to his power and his arrogance. The story follows him as he goes from being an ambitious ... The Emperor's Club Given its setting in an exclusive prep school in the nostalgic near-distant past and its focus on the role of a dedicated and inspirational teacher on the lives of a group of teenage boys, The ... The Emperor's New Groove In The Emperor's New Groove, David Spade, former Saturday Night Livealum and current star of the TV series Just Shoot Me, lends his voice to EmperorKuzco, the self-centered, ... The English Patient Yet, the true irony is that, after leaving the theater, I felt like there wasn't as much to the film as I had felt there was while watching it. The story, adapted from the 1992 Booker Prize-winning ... The Evening Star [DVD] Terms of Endearment, the 1983 Oscar-winner for Best Picture, was an unabashedly heartbreaking movie that lifted itself above its TV movie plot by paying attention to the idiosyncrasies of ... The Evil Dead [DVD] In the spring of 1982, a low-budget horror film made by a bunch of college buddies from Michigan State University, shot in the fall of 1979 on 16mm for about $50,000, debuted to unexpectedly rave ... The Ex The victim in Chip's crosshairs is Tom Reilly (Zack Braff), one of those good-natured guys who just can't seem to quite get it together. Tom is married to Sofia Kowalski (Amanda Peet), who is ... The Exorcism of Emily Rose This one-sidedness does not necessarily make The Exorcism of Emily Rose a bad film, despite the sometimes condescending arguments of critics who pride themselves on hip open-mindedness that ... The Exorcist As most know, it was taken seriously. Millions flocked to see it again and again during the winter of 1973, with lines wrapped around movie theaters as audiences waited in nervous anticipation. ... The Expendables The expendables of the title comprise a group of soldiers-for-hire led by Stallone’s grizzled, cigar-chomping Barney Ross and Ross’s second-in-command Lee Christmas (Jason Statham), whose ... The Express The subject of the film is Ernie Davis (Rob Brown), who, despite being the first African-American player to win the coveted Heisman Trophy, has been largely forgotten by the general public because ... The Exterminating Angel (El Ã�ngel exterminador) [DVD] Ultimately, it doesn’t really matter where the title came from, which is most likely why Buñuel gave conflicting accounts. When baffled audiences at the 1962 Cannes Film Festival demanded an ... The Eye As Sydney Wells, the young musician who lost her sight as a child, Jessica Alba bases her performance around an underlying sweetness and innocence that is then tormented all to hell when her new ... The Face of Another (Tanin no kao) [DVD] Like Teshigahara's previous films, his experimental first feature Pitfall (1962) and the art-house sensation Woman in the Dunes (1964), The Face of Another is a rumination on ... The Faculty The story is another reworking of Robert Heinlein's "The Puppet Masters," which was made into a movie of that title in 1994, but is best known as the inspiration for "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" ... The Fall [Blu-Ray] The story takes place in Los Angeles some time around the turn of the 20th century--not coincidentally, the dawn of cinema. A hallucinatory black-and-white credits sequence establishes the film’s ... The Family Stone The central tension in The Family Stone, which takes place over several days right before Christmas, is between the majority of the laid-back, slightly bohemian New England family of the ... The Fast and the Furious The Fast and the Furious is loud and dumb, but it's also entertaining and, attimes, even exhilarating. But, most importantly, it earns that excitement theold-fashioned way. In a summer ... The Fifth Element Combining hokey science fiction, quasi-religious sentiments, and a garish French new wave fashion sensibility, "The Fifth Element" is a tumultuous cinematic experience to say the least. It veers from ... The Final Destination The fourth entry in the series is really no different from the previous three, except that it is packaged in shiny digital 3-D and eschews a numerical affix in favor of the definite article ... The Fire Within (Le feu follet) [DVD] The same cannot be said for The Fire Within (Le feu follet), a film that many feel is Malle’s true masterpiece and is, perhaps not incidentally, the one that is most closely aligned ... The Firemen's Ball (Horí, má panenko) [DVD] Filmed in 1966 and released in 1967, just a few weeks before Soviet tanks rumbled in Czechoslovakia, Milos Forman's The Firemen's Ball (Horí, má panenko) was a political bombshell ... The First Wives Club This unfair aspect of life is the heart of "The First Wives Club," where three women in their mid-forties decide they will not be so easily cast aside by their husbands and replaced with skinny, ... The Flowers of St. Francis (Francesco, giullare di Dio) [DVD] Ironically, Rossellini made The Flowers of St. Francis during one of the most difficult periods of his life when his adulterous affair with actress Ingrid Bergman was the talk of the town and ... The Fly (1958) [DVD] The film opens with a mystery. A night watchman at an industrial plant catches a glimpse of an attractive woman running from a hydraulic steel press that she has apparently used to crush the head of ... The Fly (1986) [DVD] Near the middle of David Cronenberg's "The Fly," the main character, a brilliant scientist named Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum), declares, "You can't penetrate beyond society's sick, ... The Fly II [DVD] Near the middle of David Cronenberg's "The Fly," the main character, a brilliant scientist named Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum), declares, "You can't penetrate beyond society's sick, ... The Forgotten So, you can only imagine Telly's surprise when she is told by her psychiatrist, Dr. Munce (Gary Sinise), that she never had a child. All her memories of Sam are mental fabrications unconsciously ... The Four Feathers The Four Feathers takes place in the late 19th century when the British empire spanned nearly a quarter of the globe. It is not surprising that so many screen versions of A.E.W. Mason's 1902 ... The Fourth Man (De vierde man) Of course, this is only one of many signs the film gives us that the protagonist, a controversial alcoholic writer named Gerard Reves (Jeroen Krabbe) is in trouble. He first meets Christine Halsslag ... The French Connection [Blu-Ray] The French Connection is a deeply New York movie, shot entirely on location during the freezing winter of 1970. The location photography lends a distinct authenticity to the movie’s ... The French Connection [DVD] Prior to its release in late 1971 and subsequent winning of five of that year's Academy Awards, including best picture, director, and actor, there had never been a movie quite like The French ... The Friends of Eddie Coyle [DVD] As the title suggests, the film is a multi-character study, although the use of the word “friendsâ€� is dripping with irony given that these characters’ survival is frequently tied to someone ... The Frighteners Some may remember Jackson from his uproarious "Dead-Alive," a gross-out of a zombie parody that was one of the most hilarious and repulsive films of 1992. Other may remember him as the director of ... The Fugitive Kind [DVD] And, to be fair, it is not one of the best films derived from Williams’ work, nor is it one of director Sidney Lumet’s best films. It is a bit too ponderous, heavy-handed, and literal in its ... The Full Monty This is the attitude taken in "The Fully Monty," the independent British hit that has already taken the world by storm. The movie follows six unemployed steel workers from the declining industrial ... The Furies [DVD] Based on a novel by Niven Busch, who also wrote the novel on which King Vidor’s Duel in the Sun (1947) was based, The Furies takes its title from the fictional New Mexico ranch owned ... The Game Douglas stars as Nicholas Van Orden, a caustic, driven investment banker. He lives alone in a huge, sterile mansion atop of the hills of San Francisco, after having run his obviously loving wife away ... The General's Daughter In "The General's Daughter," a new anti-military, one-man-versus-the-establishment mystery thriller from director Simon West ("Con Air"), John Travolta plays Warrant Officer Paul Brenner, a ... The Ghost and the Darkness Although "The Ghost and the Darkness" is not the best film to come out this year, it does have the distinction of digging out some movie conventions that have been sorely missed for quite a while. ... The Ghost Goes Gear [DVD] In the mid-1960s, the Beatles starred in two films directed by Richard Lester, A Hard Day's Night (1964) and Help! (1965), that not only helped solidify the all-encompassing global ... The Ghost Writer The ill-equipped protagonist this time around is an unnamed writer (Ewan McGregor) who is hired by a massive international publishing house to ghostwrite the memoirs of Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan), a ... The Giant Gila Monster [DVD] The Giant Gila Monster may have been the perfect make-out movie. After all, as a low-budget, B-movie sci-fi/horror hybrid aimed directly at the insatiable teenage market, it played ... The Giant Leeches [DVD] In the argument of quality versus quantity, producers Roger Corman and Samuel Z. Arkoff happily opted for the latter. Both Corman and Arkoff are hallowed names in the annals of exploitation and ... The Gift [DVD] The Gift is a gripping genre concoction stirred together out of equal parts suspense-thriller, horror film, ghost story, and rural small-town melodrama. This Southern Gothic mix was brewed by ... The Gingerbread Man By the time "The Gingerbread Man" was completed, there was very little evidence that it was ever based on a story by Grisham. There's no idealist young lawyer ala Tom Cruise, Matthew McConaughey, ... The Girl Next Door The main character is Matthew Kidman (Emile Hirsch), a high-achieving senior who bemoans the fact that he isn’t doing anything to commemorate his final weeks of high school. While all the popular ... The Glass House The Glass House is a competent, but impersonal by-the-numbers thriller that never quite grabs hold of you emotionally. Veteran TV director Daniel Sackheim (NYPD Blue, The ... The Godfather (The Coppola Restoration) [Blu-Ray] “The Godfather ... is the first completely authentic modern myth in American cinema ...â€� --Jake Horsley, TheBlood Poets: A Cinema of Savagery, ... The Godfather Part II [DVD] "The Godfather ... is the first completely authentic modern myth in American cinema ..." —Jake Horsley, The Blood Poets: A Cinema of Savagery, ... The Godfather Part III [DVD] "The Godfather ... is the first completely authentic modern myth in American cinema ..." —Jake Horsley, The Blood Poets: A Cinema of Savagery, ... The Godfather [DVD] "The Godfather ... is the first completely authentic modern myth in American cinema ..." —Jake Horsley, The Blood Poets: A Cinema of Savagery, ... The Golden Age of Television [DVD] Anyone who has spent a significant amount of time watching television, especially in the years since Minow’s speech, will recognize the hard edges of truth in the chairman’s blunt criticism. ... The Golden Coach (Le Carrosse d'or) [DVD] While some critics have tried valiantly to unearth thematic and aesthetic continuities between his pre-Hollywood and post-Hollywood films, most agree that it is best to see them as distinctly ... The Golden Compass Not having read the books, I can't stand one side or the other, but I can say that I found the film to be a colossal bore--a meandering, shapeless adventure that takes you from one place to another ... The Good Girl While The Good Girl purports to be a quirky slice-of-life melodrama about simple people caught in a dead-end world, what it ultimately does is deflate the myth of escape. Jennifer Aniston, in ... The Good Shepherd So, perhaps De Niro is feeling the need for some penance, which might explain why he has chosen The Good Shepherd as his sophomore directing effort, his first time behind the camera ... The Gospel According to St. Matthew So why did Pasolini make such a film? There are a number of reasons, including his love and respect for his mother, who was a devoted Catholic, and his affinity for the socially aware Pope John Paul ... The Graduate [DVD] Yet, the film still works beautifully, and to understand just how relevant The Graduate is four decades after its initial release divided American audiences right down the generation gap, all ... The Graduates The film’s basic premise revolves around “Senior Week,â€� which is apparently a time-honored Maryland tradition in which graduating high school seniors pile into cars and head out to Ocean City ... The Great Debaters Washington plays Melvin B. Tolson, a poet, teacher, and social rebel who took a post teaching English at Wiley and headed up the school's debate team. Tolson is a tough-love professor--part drill ... The Green Mile I'd be critical of the fact that Frank Darabont's entire directorial career has revolved around sweepingly sentimental movies based on Stephen King prison dramas - if only he didn't do them so well. ... The Grifters Stephen Frears' "The Grifters" is almost too cynical and mean-spirited for its own good. In its attempt to expose the gritty underbelly of the con game, it makes itself into something like "The ... The Grudge The Grudge's flimsy plot and numerous gaps in logic suggest a slasher film, in which the main goal of the narrative is to draw unsuspecting victims into dangerous circumstances and then goose ... The Hand [DVD] I Bury the Living is a corker of a horror-thriller that draws you in, but ultimately lets you down with an “explanatoryâ€� ending that just doesn’t fit. Made quickly on a ... The Hangover The movie opens with a brief glimpse of the sun-soaked disaster to come, and then goes back two days to introduce us to the heroes before sending them off to Vegas. The groom-to-be is Doug (Justin ... The Happening In case you missed any of the previews or didn’t see the movie posters in which the film’s rating is printed in red, this is R-rated M. Night Shyamlan territory. Shyamalan has done movies about ... The Harder They Come [DVD] Before Perry Henzell's The Harder They Come was released in 1973, Jamaica had never seen itself on screen. Having earned independence from England a scant 10 years earlier, the small island ... The Haunted Mansion Disney’s The Haunted Mansion is, like last summer’s Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, inspired by the theme-park ride of the same name. Scripted by David ... The Haunted Strangler [DVD] Karloff’s silver screen renaissance, which would be fueled primarily by the films of Roger Corman in the 1960s, began with 1958’s The Haunted Strangler (aka, Grip of the ... The Haunting It's been a while since someone has made an out-and-out haunted house movie. Not a jokey, campy ghoul fest ala "House" (1986) or "The Frighteners" (1996), but a straight, fear-doused chiller. As a ... The Haunting in Connecticut Thankfully, the truthfulness of the story has little or nothing to do with how well the film works, and while it relies on a lot of conventional horror devices and familiar ideas, it still works at ... The Hidden Fortress (Kakushi toride no san akunin) [DVD] In the critical community during the 1950s, there were two paradoxical lines of criticism of postwar Japanese cinema. On the one hand, some critics complained that Japanese films were too exotic and ... The Hills Have Eyes For the remake of Wes Craven’s mutants-in-the-desert shocker The Hills Have Eyes, Hollywood brought in French director Alexandre Aja, who proved his grisly mettle with High Tension ... The Hills Have Eyes II Unfortunately, he hasn’t replaced terrible memories so much as created new ones. The new Hills Have Eyes sequel is just about as bad as the original sequel, even if it is clearly the ... The Hit [DVD] Shot almost entirely in the arid deserts of central Spain, The Hit details a cross-country road trip undertaken by a strange quartet, one of whom is being driven to his death. The one who is ... The Hitcher Working with two other scribes, screenwriter Eric Red (Near Dark) has updated his original screenplay only slightly, keeping the general tone and approach to the story the same, as well as ... The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy The new movie version, directed by music video veteran Garth Jennings, has been long in gestation, with most of the screenplay having been penned by Adams himself before his death in 2001 (it was ... The Hoax >If you don’t know anything about the life of Clifford Irving, then you probably won’t think ... The Honeymoon Killers [DVD] One of the reasons Leonard Kastle’s The Honeymoon Killers has developed into a cult classic in the three decades since its theatrical release is because watching it with distanced irony is ... The Horror of Frankenstein [DVD] In the late 1960s, Britain-based Hammer Studios, having gained fame and fortune in the late 1950s by reimagining old Universal horror flicks as gaudy, full-color Gothic shockers, was in trouble. The ... The Horse Whisperer In his latest film, "The Horse Whisperer," based on the best-selling novel by Nicholas Evans, Redford again plays such a character. Redford also directed the film although he swore up and down that ... The Horse's Mouth [DVD] When the story opens, Gulley is being released from a month's stay in jail for harassing Hickson (Ernest Thesiger), a wealthy old man who has helped support Gulley's painting career, but also bought ... The Hours [DVD] Starring a trio of well-respected actresses and based on a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Hours is pure Oscar-bait; it wears its hearty ambitions on its sleeve, but never convinces that ... The House on Haunted Hill When infamous horror director/producer William Castle made schlock-shock movies like 1958's "The House on Haunted Hill," there was a certain charm to the effort that overrode the fundamental ... The House on Sorority Row [DVD] Mark Rosman's The House on Sorority Row is a mid-'80s slasher flick that has been largely forgotten, which is unfortunate because it's one of the better ones, an interesting and generally ... The Householder [DVD] That is the central dilemma in Prem’s life, and the film chronicles in flashback the first year of his marriage as he grows from not knowing the beautiful young woman to whom he has just been ... The Hunted For many years now, but particularly since the gravity-defying theatrics of The Matrix (1999) and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), most representations of violence in big-budget ... The Hurricane "The Hurricane" is a well-intentioned true story of hope and justice that is well-acted enough to overcome its weaknesses. In particular, it is Denzel Washington's extraordinary performance as ... The Hurt Locker The film opens with a blunt statement by New York Times war correspondent Chris Hedges that “war is a drug,â€� something that will not immediately register with most people who imagine war ... The Hustler [DVD] Eddie is a loser--he just doesn't know it. At the beginning of the film he is brash, confident, and arrogant. Working with his older partner and financier, Charlie Burns (Myron McCormick), he ... The Ice Storm [DVD] Set to an ethereal, haunting score by Mychael Danna in which the final notes seem to die out rather than fade away, The Ice Storm takes place in 1973 over the Thanksgiving weekend, that great ... The Illusionist [DVD] There is something entrancing about The Illusionist, but something slightly infuriating, as well, because it insists on tacking on a last-minute coda that explains (sort of) everything that ... The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus One of the film’s true pleasures, though, is the imaginarium of the title, which is a colossal, ramshackle traveling theater that is pulled through the very modern streets of London by a team of ... The Importance of Being Earnest [DVD] The Importance of Being Earnest has been brought to the movie screen on several occasions (including a version recently directed by Oliver Parker), but the most celebrated cinematic rendition ... The Incredible Hulk After a kaleidoscopic opening credits sequence that recaps how scientist Bruce Banner (Edward Norton) shot himself with gamma rays and unleashed his inner monster, we find Banner hiding in the ... The Incredibles One can’t fault Bird for going a bit more toward the middle with his latest film, the Pixar-produced The Incredibles. But, even here, Bird has maintained his unique cinematic sensibilities ... The Incubus [DVD] Horror films, by their very nature, are disreputable. Some would argue, in fact, that the power of horror derives from its taboo busting, its willingness to "speak the unspeakable" and "show the ... The Informant! Of course, Soderbergh is too complex a filmmaker to simply play the material as broad comedy (which is what the trailers imply); rather, he tweaks it just into the realm of dark humor, but without ... The Insect Woman (Nippon konchuki) [DVD] In his previous film, Pigs and Battleships (1961), Imamura had shown both a fascination with and a deep respect for strong, resilient women who are able to secure their own identity and place ... The Insider It is quite possible that the most amazing achievement in Michael Mann's new film, "The Insider," is that he keeps it so intriguing for such a long period of time. Movies of this nature--true-story ... The International Heady stuff, to be sure, and The International certainly strains at every corner to convince the audience that it’s a serious paranoid cautionary tale, with its careful mixing of ... The Interpreter Nicole Kidman stars as Silvia Broome, a white African working as a translator at the U.N. One night, she happens to overhear a late-night whispered conversation between two unseen men about a plot ... The Invasion First-time screenwriter Dave Kajganich has cleverly re-imagined the body snatchers as microscopic alien spores that take over your DNA, rather than large pods that recreate your body and reduce you ... The Invention of Lying We get our first taste of this when the film’s hero, a meek but likable schlub named Mark Bellison (Gervais) who works as a screenwriter (which sounds exciting until you realize that, in a world ... The Invisible It's an intriguing premise and one that is not without promise, but if The Invisible has a weakness, it's earnestness. There is no doubt that this film is solemnly sincere, yet it never ... The Iron Giant Forget that awful advertising campaign that tries to be an homage to 1950scomic books, but makes the movie look like an imported animated cheapie withno plot and dubbed dialogue ("It came from OUTER ... The Island From the “glass half-fullâ€� perspective, Michael Bay’s The Island is his best film since 1996’s The Rock and the first of his films to have a genuinely interesting idea backing ... The Italian Job [DVD] The best heist movies are never about the heist itself, but rather about the motivations behind it. The usual motivation is the “last big score,â€� an aging criminal’s final, brazen attempt to ... The Jane Austen Book Club The group is formed largely as a response to loss. Jocelyn (Maria Bello), the proudly single member of the group (she refuses to feel bad about being alone in her early forties) loses one of her ... The Karate Kid Technically, this new version should be called The Kung Fu Kid, since there is no karate on display, but rather, in keeping with the new setting, the ancient art of kung fu. But, since the ... The Kentucky Fried Movie [DVD] In 1969, brothers David and Jerry Zucker and their childhood friend, Jim Abrahams, all of whom were students at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, began performing a multimedia stage act out ... The Kid For a corny, life-lesson Disney movie, "The Kid" is really quite good. The premise couldn't be any more saccharine: A rich, misanthropic adult is magically faced with his own eight-year-old self and ... The Kid Stays in the Picture The title of The Kid Stays in the Picture, Brett Morgen and Nanette Burstein’s portrait of Hollywood legend Robert Evans’ life, comes from the mouth of another Hollywood legend, the great ... The Kids Are All Right To their credit, Cholodenko and cowriter Stuart Blumberg (The Girl Next Door) deal with the story’s tricky personal, sexual, and political terrain with a generally deft touch that softens ... The Killer (Die xue shuang xiong) Of course, because this takes place in the world of Hong Kong action auteur John Woo, probably the most able choreographer of blood-soaked, slow-motion shoot-outs since Sam Peckinpah, the irony is ... The Killer Inside Me “Crackedâ€� is a perfect description of Winterbottom’s uneven, but fascinatingly nasty adaptation of Thompson’s 1952 novel (possible his most disturbing), which maintains the author’s ... The Killers (1946) [DVD] Who are the men coming to kill him? Why do they want him dead? Why is the would-be victim so passive in accepting his fate? Is he eventually killed? All of these questions linger at the end of the ... The Killers (1964) [DVD] Who are the men coming to kill him? Why do they want him dead? Why is the would-be victim so passive in accepting his fate? Is he eventually killed? All of these questions linger at the end of the ... The Killing Fields When the film opens, it is 1975 and the Vietnam War is coming to a close. Schanberg and Dith Pran, along with a photographer named Al Rockoff (John Malkovich) and a British journalist named Jon Swain ... The King of Kings [DVD] Along with D.W. Griffith, Cecil B. DeMille was one of the great pioneers of American silent films, although by the late 1920s it was already clear that he had become mired in an outdated cinematic ... The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters The narrative centers on a cross-country rivalry between two men: Billy Mitchell and Steve Wiebe. In classic arcade game circles, Mitchell is a legend, having held the world record scores on ... The Kingdom The title of The Kingdom refers to Saudi Arabia, whose close relationship with the United States is explained in Cliff Notes fashion in a vertiginous, rapid-fire graphic display during the ... The Kite Runner The story opens in Afghanistan in 1978 and introduces us to Amir (Zekeria Ebrahimi), whose Baba (father) is a wealthy intellectual (Homayoun Ershadi) who is openly political in his derision of both ... The Lady Eve [DVD] The Lady Eve is writer-director Preston Sturges' ode to romance as the greatest con game of all. Always the ironic satirist with a love of great characters and improbably wild scenarios, in ... The Lady Vanishes [DVD] The Lady Vanishes was the second-to-last film Hitchcock made in his native England before moving to Hollywood at the invitation of producer David O. Selznick, and it is by far his most ... The Ladykillers (1955) [DVD] Because England is a country well known for its cultural refinement, black comedy has always been a natural fit there because it can play off those proper manners in absurdly comic ways. Take, for ... The Ladykillers (2004) > While their most recent outing, last year’s Intolerable ... The Lair of the White Worm Russell, who has never been known for his subtlety, has spent the last thirty-five years consistently pushing the envelope of both taste and comprehension. Sometimes he overloads his films with so ... The Land of College Prophets Their first film, which they made just out of high school, carries the delirious title Thrill Kill Jack (2000) and boldly places front and center on its video sleeve part of the text of ... The Last Airbender Regardless, The Last Airbender does not strike a note of confidence in his resurrection, not so much because it is a bad film, but because it is so badly matched to Shyamalan’s talents. ... The Last Castle A few days before The Last Castle arrived in theaters, an article was published in Newsweek magazine in which a Marine officer name Dan Sullivan argued against the antimilitary culture ... The Last Command [DVD] The great German actor Emil Jannings, who had previously done his best work with F. W. Murnau (including 1924’s The Last Laugh and 1926’s Faust), won the very first Best Actor ... The Last Days of Disco [DVD] Much of the action takes place in an appropriately gaudy Studio 54-ish club in New York referred to simply as “The Club.â€� It has a front door carefully guarded by snooty bouncers and surrounded ... The Last Emperor [DVD] The Last Emperor tells the unlikely, but amazingly true story of Pu Yi, who, in 1908, at the tender age of 3 was taken from his mother and made emperor of China. Installed on the Dragon ... The Last Exorcism The Last Exorcism follows in this trend by applying the pseudo-documentary approach to the demon possession movie, and the film both benefits and ultimately suffers because of it. On the plus ... The Last House on the Left (1972) [DVD] Whenever anyone writes about the independent low-budget shocker The Last House on the Left, the word that is used most often to describe it is disturbing. On a short list of notorious ... The Last House on the Left (2009) Thus, a remake offers the possibility of maintaining the film’s studied, if not particularly pleasant, thematic undertones while rectifying Craven’s genuinely bizarre tonal range. Screenwriters ... The Last King of Scotland Amin’s story from his own point of view has already been told on film in Barbet Schroder’s fascinating 1974 documentary General Idi Amin Dada, in which Amin attempted to charm the camera ... The Last Kiss For many reasons, The Last Kiss will be compared to Garden State (2004), primarily because of the presence of Zack Braff playing a guy in his twenties who is unsure of his future (it ... The Last Metro (Le dernier metro) [DVD] The Last Metro also bears out Truffaut’s love of art and its capacity to survive even during the most tumultuous of times. The story takes place in 1942 and revolves primarily around the ... The Last Mistress (Une vieille maîtresse) The film’s international selling point is the collaboration between Breillat and her star, Asia Argento, who shares with her director a sense of fearless provocation and brute honesty as defining ... The Last of the Mohicans [DVD] Director Michael Mann said that his first memory of going to the movies was the 1936 version of The Last of the Mohicans. It is fitting, then, that when he returned to the big screen after ... The Last Picture Show Framed between these two shots, Bogdanovich and Larry McMurtry, who wrote the novel on which the film is based, weave the stories of several of the town's inhabitants, painting a sharp portrait of ... The Last Samurai Edward Zwick’s The Last Samurai is about two warriors from extremely different cultures who start out as enemies, find that they share much in common ideologically, and end up fighting ... The Last Sin Eater The film's heroine is a little girl named Cadi (Liana Liberato) who seeks out the Sin Eater despite his pariah status (villagers are not even allowed to look at him when he enters the cemetery ... The Last Wave [DVD] Produced in Australia during the height of the "Australian Film Renaissance," which also featured the rise of directors such as Bruce Beresford, Fred Schepisi, and George Miller, The Last ... The Legend of Bagger Vance The Legend of Bagger Vance is a Depression-era fable about a mysterious caddy who helps an emotionally scarred veteran of World War I, who was at one time the most promising professional ... The Legend of Drunken Master (Tsui kun II) Originally released in Hong Kong back in 1994, The Legend of Drunken Master (Jui kuen II) is considered by Jackie Chan fans to be one of his finest movies, and it is surprising that it ... The Leopard (Il Gattopardo) [DVD] The Leopard stands out not only for its bold vision and epic scope, but because of the intricate ways in which it melds pop melodrama, historical sweep, and bold cinematic artistry. Director ... The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou Bill Murray stars as the eponymous Steve Zissou, a world-famed explorer-documentarian ala Jacques Cousteau whose self-propagated cultural cache is hitting a new low. He’s having a hard time ... The Life of David Gale The Life of David Gale is being slammed pretty hard by a lot of critics, mostly because they want it be something it is not. As a tract on the unfeasible nature of the death penalty in ... The Limey Steven Soderbergh is a tough director to put your finger on. He exploded onto the scene in 1989 with the indie groundbreaker "sex, lies, and videotape," and his career since then has been a ... The Little Mermaid [DVD] It may be hard to believe in an age when Disney animated films are considered failures when they only gross $100 million, but there was a time not too long ago when the Disney animated studio was in ... The Lives of Others (Das Leben der Anderen) [DVD] Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch) is a successful playwright who has found favor with the government with his socialist plays, yet has somehow managed to not become a simple puppet of the regime. He ... The Lone Ranger and the Lost City of Gold [DVD] Probably the single most famous cowboy in all of American Western lore, The Lone Ranger, was not born in the fevered mind of a pulp writer or borrowed from the pages of literature. Rather, he was ... The Lone Ranger [DVD] Probably the single most famous cowboy in all of American Western lore, The Lone Ranger, was not born in the fevered mind of a pulp writer or borrowed from the pages of literature. Rather, he was ... The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (Extended Edition) [DVD] The Fellowship of the Ring, the first part of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, is a towering feat of visual virtuosity. It takes a much beloved literary classic—unfilmable in just ... The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring [DVD] The Fellowship of the Ring, the first part of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, is a towering feat of visual virtuosity. It takes a much beloved literary classic--unfilmable in just ... The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (Extended Edition) [DVD] The film works so well because it maintains the intensity and vigor of both The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), which depicted a world of peace sliding into chaos, and The Two Towers ... The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (Extended Edition) [DVD] Unlike The Fellowship of the Ring, which opened with an information-packed prologue and then slowly eased itself into an extensive and leisurely introduction to all the major characters in ... The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers [DVD] Unlike The Fellowship of the Ring, which opened with an information-packed prologue and then slowly eased itself into an extensive and leisurely introduction to all the major characters in ... The Lords of Discipline [DVD] The story is set at the fictional Carolina Military Institute in South Carolina, some time during the mid-1960s when America was in a period of profound social change. Although at first the film ... The Losers The story opens in Bolivia, where we are introduced to the titular quintet of Special Ops warriors: tech expert Jensen (Chris Evans), second-in-command Roque (Idris Elba), escape driver Pooch ... The Lost World [DVD] The Lost World gained additional notoriety when Doyle appeared in 1922 before the American Society of Magicians with film footage of what he claimed were extinct animals. For years Doyle had ... The Lost World: Jurassic Park How did he fare? By all accounts, I have to say that "The Lost World" is a tremendously enjoyable action adventure. Taken by itself, it's a finely crafted piece of excitement that once again proves ... The Love Guru As an actor and comedian with a notorious penchant for perfectionism, Myers excels at playing characters in the broadest sense. Any time he tries to convey normality, he flops, which is why he has ... The Love Letter "The Love Letter" starts out as a light, romantic farce, and ends up a dissatisfying exploration of the emptiness and lost opportunities suffered by all the major characters. The movie doesn't work ... The Lovely Bones The girl is Susie Salmon (“like the fish,â€� she says), who is beautifully played by Saoirse Ronan (who was so good in Atonement) with a careful measure of gently scrubbed naïveté and ... The Lovers (Les amants) [DVD] This captivating sequence, exquisitely shot and edited, drifts in a dreamlike atmosphere that suggests the overwhelming of the senses with passion and abandon. Shot in beautiful black-and-white ... The Machinist [DVD] During the day, Reznick works as a lathe operator at a machine shop that looks about four decades out of date, and he spends his evenings either in the arms of a sympathetic prostitute (Jennifer ... The Magdalene Sisters In last spring’s quirky adventure-comedy Holes, a group of wayward boys are sent to an isolated desert camp to dig holes, ostensibly because, as the warden puts it, “You take a bad boy, ... The Magnificent Seven [DVD] It is oddly appropriate that John Sturges' The Magnificent Seven is an Americanized remake of Akira Kurosawa's masterful Japanese epic Seven Samurai (1954). Seven Samurai had ... The Majestic The Majestic is the third film directed by Frank Darabont, but it is the first that is not based on something written by Stephen King and set in a prison. And, after watching The ... The Man in the Iron Mask Maybe it has something to do with the fact that the Three Musketeers, Aramis (Jeremy Irons), Athos (John Malkovich ), and Porthos (Gérard Depardieu) are retired when the film opens. Or maybe it's ... The Man Who Fell to Earth [DVD] The Man Who Fell to Earth is simultaneously one of Roeg’s best films and one of his worst, which is not an impossible contradiction in his realm. It is plugged directly into Roeg’s visual ... The Man Who Knew Too Much [DVD] The Man Who Knew Too Much was the only film Alfred Hitchcock made twice. He was never completely satisfied with the original 1934 version, which was made in his native England and was the ... The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance [DVD] The tensions between wilderness and civilization, personal justice and the legal system, the individual and the community have always fueled the Western genre, but they have never been laid quite so ... The Man Who Wasn't There Classic film noir—those American crime films made in the darkness of the neurotic postwar years that the French recognized as genius but the homefront could only see as B-movies that weren't well ... The Manchurian Candidate (1962) "The Manchurian Candidate" is mostly a cinematic backlash against the absurdities of the McCarthy hearings and the anti-Communist feeding frenzy of the fifties. The story concerns a group of ... The Manchurian Candidate (2004) [DVD] Taking full advantage of the charged political climate and frayed post-9/11 nerves, Demme’s remake is a political thriller crossed with a horror film. The original played along the fringes of ... The Marine [DVD] The bulging mass of muscles at the center of the The Marine is WWE superstar John Cena, who looks a bit like Matt Damon pumped up with 1,000 CC’s of steroids. Thankfully, not much is ... The Mask of Zorro The main character in "The Mask of Zorro," the latest entry into the modernized pulp hero category, is the classic hero of comic books, pulp magazines, and movie serials of the first part of the ... The Matrix The Wachowski Brothers, who both wrote and directed this sophomore effort, throw situations and characters at you with the rapid fire intensity of a machine gun, with little or no context as to what ... The Matrix Reloaded When The Matrix was released in March of 1999, it seemed to come out of nowhere, an under-the-radar surprise blockbuster no one was expecting. An intriguing marketing campaign that asked the ... The Matrix Revolutions Released just six months after The Matrix Reloaded, The Matrix Revolutions has been labeled a failure, both at the U.S. box office (where its opening weekend numbers were about half of ... The Men Who Stare at Goats Like Ronson’s book, the film anchors its story in a first-person investigation, which is here led by Bob Wilton (Ewan McGregor), a small-town Michigan newspaper writer who decides to become a war ... The Mexican Although the majority of Gore Verbinski's crime-comedy The Mexican does take place south of the border, the title of the movie refers to a mystical handgun that sets the plot in the motion. ... The Missing Perhaps as a way of proving his range as a director, Ron Howard has decided to follow up his multiple-Oscar-winning A Beautiful Mind (2001) with The Missing, a moody and arduously ... The Mist The Mist is the first of Darabont's films to be completely and utterly lacking in sentimentality. It is a carefully structured descent into hopelessness, capped off by a profoundly cruel ... The Mothman Prophecies The Mothman Prophecies is an effectively creepy supernatural chiller, but it is best taken as straight fiction, rather than in connection with the events that purportedly took place in Point ... The Mummy Returns [DVD] Virtually everyone associated with 1999's The Mummy has returned for the sequel, The Mummy Returns, which isn't surprising when you consider that, in most respects, it is the same ... The Mummy [DVD] If you're one of those who despises the idea of modern filmmakers remaking classics of the Hollywood Golden Age, don't be worried about The Mummy--outside of the title and the barest plot ... The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor Like both previous movies, Tomb of the Dragon Emperor opens with a backstory set thousands of the years in the past, this time involving a war-mongering Chinese emperor named Han (Jet Li) who ... The Naked City [DVD] The crime that sets the story in motion is the murder of a beautiful young starlet, who is found dead in her apartment’s bathtub by the maid. The murder itself has all the hallmarks of a tabloid ... The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! [DVD] "The Naked Gun" was taken from a short-lived 1982 TV series called "Police Squad!," which was the brainchild of the celebrated guerilla comedy team of Jerry Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and David Zucker, ... The Naked Prey [DVD] Wilde started as an actor in the 1940s, and he graduated to leading man status in the 1950s in adventure films that took advantage of his rugged good looks and chiseled physique. Such movie stars ... The Natural [Blu-Ray] The film’s golden (and golden-haired) hero is Roy Hobbs, not so much played as embodied by Robert Redford in his first role in four years (during the off time he won an Oscar for directing ... The Negotiator Jackson's voice is highly inflected, constantly rising in peaks and valleys, sometimes so shrill in its intensity that it's painful. Remember how his delivery of one line--"I don't remember asking ... The New Eve (La Nouvelle Eve) Midway through "The New Eve" ("La Nouvelle Eve"), the film's protagonist, a willful, rebellious young Parisian named Camille (Karin Viard) tells a friend that she has fallen in love with a married ... The New World Arriving in theaters roughly 16 minutes shorter than when it premiered in December in New York and Los Angeles to qualify for Oscar nominations, The New World is an intriguing, but ... The Next Best Thing Is it possible for there to be a film starring Madonna that does not include at least one of her songs during the movie? Is there something in her contract that demands that she must be included in ... The Night Heaven Fell (Les Bijoutiers du clair de lune) [DVD] Director Roger Vadim and his wife-star Brigitte Bardot first collaborated in 1956 on ... And God Created Woman, which was also Vadim's directorial debut after years of cowriting scripts for ... The Night Listener Yet, no one has actually seen him, except his adoptive mother, Donna (Toni Collette). There are plenty of people who claim to know him, ranging from the waitress at the diner in the small ... The Ninth Gate Roman Polanski's "The Ninth Gate" is a solid, engrossing supernatural mystery-thriller that comes completely undone in the last five minutes by presenting us with a vague, inexplicable ending that ... The Number 23 The chief culprit in The Number 23 is its use of ridiculous noir-ish flashback sequences, in which the dog-catcher protagonist Walter Sparrow (Jim Carrey) imagines himself as a hard-boiled ... The Object of My Affection Nina and George first meet at a dinner party given by Nina's step-sister, Constance (Allison Janey) and her powerful literary agent husband, Sidney (Alan Alda). Nina is currently dating Vince (John ... The Omen (2006) The opening is one of the few moments when Moore allows The Omen to diverge substantially from Richard Donner's original, which spawned three sequels and a strong fear among many of stoic, ... The Only Son (Hitori musuko) [DVD] Like most of Ozu’s family dramas, The Only Son has a simple plot built on generational tensions whose narrative surface is but a thin mask for much deeper issues and themes. The main ... The Order The Order reunites the major players who two years ago brought us the giddy-goofy medieval action flick A Knight’s Tale—including writer/director Brian Helgeland and stars Heath ... The Orphanage (El Orfanato) None of this is original, of course, and you can feel the pulse of so many European art-horror films beating just beneath of the surface that it would be almost too easy to dismiss The ... The Other Guys Collaborating with Ferrell for the fourth time after Anchorman (2004), Talladega Nights (2006), and Step Brothers (2008), director Adam McKay knows intuitively what to do, which ... The Other Sister "The Other Sister" tackles a subject--the life and livelihoods of the mentally challenged--in a way few other Hollywood movies do by making it the center of the story. And, for about the first ... The Others Alejandro Amenábar's The Others is a small masterpiece of atmosphere and tone that slowly and methodically works its way through a classically elegant, yet gut-wringing ghost story with a ... The Out-of-Towners That jolt comes in the form of a two-day trip to New York City, where Henry is scheduled for an important job interview. Nancy thinks he just wants to move up the career ladder and make more money, ... The Passenger (Professione: reporter) [DVD] However, working with Antonioni was Nicholson’s greatest feat because it paired him with an austere auteur whose modus operandi was so distinct from Nicholson’s own. Antonioni’s emphasis on ... The Passion of the Christ [Blu-Ray] >Pauline Kael, in her typically blunt, but insightful manner, summed ... The Patriot In a scene late in "The Patriot," Mel Gibson's character stands huddled over his dead son, the second of his seven children to have been killed before his eyes. His face wrinkled in agony, his ... The People vs. Larry Flynt Flynt (played in the film by Woody Harrelson) grew up poor white trash and later became rich white trash. He started out by running a series of strip clubs in Cleveland and wound up the head of a ... The Perfect Storm "I had some misgivings about calling it The Perfect Storm, but in the end I decided that the intent was sufficiently clear. I use perfect in the meteorological sense: a storm that ... The Phantom of Liberty (Le Fantôme de la liberté) [DVD] In fact, if anything, The Phantom of Liberty plays like a Buñuel greatest hits platter, once again spinning the usual suspects into a surreal world where the joke is squarely on them. ... The Phantom of the Opera Of course, sets that look amazing live on a stage lose some of their impact on celluloid, but never fear because Schumacher and production designer Anthony Pratt (a favorite of Neil Jordan’s) have ... The Pianist Roman Polanski survived the Holocaust when he was seven years old because his father cut a hole for him a barbed wire fence. He lived with various families over the years while his father spent ... The Pillow Book Like all Greenaway's films, "The Pillow Book" is nothing if not a visual marvel, more a painting in motion than a movie. Defenders of Greenaway will claim that it's his imagery, not his storytelling ... The Pink Panther (2006) On the other hand, Inspector Clouseau, the bumbling hero of the Pink Panther series, belongs heart and soul to Peter Sellers. This is not to say that other actors haven’t tried to fill the ... The Pirate Movie [DVD] The film takes the form of a dream -- a teen girl’s fantasy, in fact -- which is the first clue to its lofty aspirations. By employing fantasy to define its narrative, The Pirate Movie is ... The Pixar Story In some ways, The Pixar Story is actually two stories, the first infinitely more interesting than the second because it has drama, hardships, and surprise, whereas the second story is simply ... The Pledge Sean Penn's The Pledge is about a man named Jerry Black who is absolutely surethat he is right about something, but is never able to prove it. There is a kind of terriblegrandeur to Penn's ... The Polar Express Riding aboard the train is a group of children who will get to see Santa Claus on Christmas Eve. The protagonist is a young boy (voiced by Spy Kid Daryl Sabara) who has lost his faith in ... The Pornographers (Jinruigaku nyumon) [DVD] Director Shohei Imamura loved outcast characters, so it’s no surprise that he made a film like The Pornographers (Jinruigaku nyumon), which is about a man who makes illegal 8mm stag ... The Poseidon Adventure The plot is simple enough: on New Year's Eve, a luxurious cruise liner, the S.S. Poseidon, is on its final voyager before being dismantled. An undersea earthquake nearby sends a flood of tidal waves, ... The Postman The film takes place in 2013, but it has the tone and mythical aspirations of a Spaghetti Western. Kevin Costner stars as a futuristic version of Clint Eastwood's Man With No Name, a resolute drifter ... The Postman (Il Postino) The man, Mario Ruppolo (brought to life with wonderful charm and feeling by the late Massimo Troisi) is a postman on a small Italian island in the early 1950s. The island is so small and backward ... The Prestige And isn't that what Christopher Nolan and his co-screenwriter/brother Jonathan do best? After all, they were the minds behind Memento (2001), which was both an elegant treatise on the ... The Prince of Egypt As the first full-length animated effort from DreamWorks Studios, "The Prince of Egypt" posits a serious challenge to Disney's dominion by heading in a different direction. Almost everything about it ... The Princess and the Frog [Blu-Ray] Stylistically and narratively, it looks and sounds and proceeds like any number of classic Disney features, but co-writer/directors Ron Clements and John Musker give each of the familiar elements a ... The Princess Bride [DVD] During that run he also directed The Princess Bride, a charming and utterly disarming swashbuckling fairy tale that is also a smart, funny satire of swashbuckling fairy tales. The film has ... The Princess Diaries Anyone who considers him- or herself hip will probably hate The Princess Diaries because it is one of the most willfully unhip movies to come along in quite a while. Yet, its very unhipness ... The Producers So, in 2001, it was that much more of a surprise when Brooks re-remerged, not on the big screen, but on Broadway, with a lavish, hilarious musical version of The Producers. Walking away with ... The Proper Care & Feeding of an American Messiah [DVD] The Proper Care & Feeding of an American Messiah is nothing if not a completely unique film--a cult film waiting to find its cult. It clearly borrows its mockumentary style from the work of ... The Prowler [Blu-Ray] The film begins with a startling image, not of horror or violence, but rather a newsreel clip of thousands of GIs returning to New York Harbor on a massive British ship. More News on March ... The Punisher Thomas Jane (Dreamcatcher) stars as Frank Castle, a tall, dark, and handsome FBI agent whose last sting operation results in the death of the son of Howard Saint (John Travolta), a wealthy ... The Pursuit of Happyness [DVD] The film tells the real-life story of Chris Gardner (played by Will Smith, who also co-produced), who in the early 1980s struggled against all odds to complete a highly competitive internship at ... The Queen As the title implies, the film’s central character is Queen Elizabeth II, played magnificently by Helen Mirren. Elizabeth bears the film’s central conflict--the tear between stasis and ... The Rage: Carrie 2 The two films follow exactly the same narrative path: An unpopular outcast is drawn into the "in" crowd only to be humiliated in front of a large group, at which time her anger becomes so intense ... The Reader The Reader reunites director Stephen Daldry and screenwriter David Hare, who last collaborated on The Hours, and it proves to be every bit as plodding and earnestly morose as that ... The Recruit Over the years, Al Pacino has gotten so good at chewing the scenery that it’s easy to imagine him doing it in his sleep. In The Recruit, he’s not exactly sleep-chewing, but it’s pretty ... The Red Shoes [DVD] Based on an unproduced original screenplay that Pressburger had first concocted in the 1930s for producer Alexander Korda, The Red Shoes is essentially a love triangle in which a young ... The Replacement Killers The answer? Both formers want to do what the four latters have already done. Chow Yun-Fat, the star of Antoine Fuqua's stylish action thriller "The Replacement Killers" is hoping that he can make the ... The Replacements It is clear that screenwriter Vince McKewin ("Fly Away Home") has beenwatching his sports movies. His script for "The Replacements" is acombination of every cinematic sports cliché, from genre ... The Ring The Ring is an Americanized remake of Ringu, a wildly popular 1998 Japanese horror film that has already spawned a sequel and a prequel in its native country after breaking box-office ... The Ring Two The Ring, which was a remake of the 1998 Japanese horror hit Ringu, was built on a flimsy-silly idea in which people who watched a mysterious videotape died seven days later. The idea ... The Ringer Jackass-turned-actor Johnny Knoxville stars as Steve Barker, a slightly spineless, nice-guy everyman who finds himself in a dilemma when his boss orders him to fire the company janitor, ... The River [DVD] The film is set in India, and whether it takes place in the 1920s after World War I or the late 1940s after World War II is never entirely clear. The story, which is by far the film's weakest ... The Road to El Dorado In 1998, DreamWorks made an impressive debut into the traditionally Disney-dominated realm of feature-length animation with "The Prince of Egypt," a bold, colorful, and respectful retelling of the ... The Road Warrior (aka Mad Max 2) Several years have passed since Max lost his wife and child to a biker gang, and since then, civilization has completed deteriorated. An clever black and white prologue tells us that World War III ... The Robe [Blu-Ray] The main character is Marcellus Gallio (Richard Burton), a Roman tribune who is, in many ways, the epitome of Hollywood’s view of Roman decadence. Portrayed as a casual womanizer whose empty and ... The Rocky Horror Picture Show [DVD] There had never been--and, since its release, never has been--a movie like "The Rocky Horror Picture Show." In terms of both the successfully over-the-top mixture of horror, camp, rock'n'roll, ... The Royal Tenenbaums Wes Anderson and Owen Wilson have a knack for combining deep melancholy with an even deeper optimism. They also have a unique way of looking at brilliant people who are brilliant in unconventional ... The Ruins [DVD] Structurally The Ruins evokes the Hostel films, with their twisted fairy-tale morality about not straying too far and the inevitable consequences of a consequences-be-damned attitude. ... The Rules of Attraction The Rules of Attraction is pointless adolescent nihilism wrapped up in new-wave film school pretension. The nonlinear storyline, showy use of reverse motion, and incessant internal dialogue ... The Rules of the Game (Le Règle du jeu) [DVD] François Truffaut called Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game (Le Règle du jeu) “the credo of film lovers, the film of films.â€� Indeed, having been ranked as one of the 10 ... The Ruling Class [DVD] The historical rigidity and socially sanctioned elitism of the British class system has been a target of constant parody for centuries, from Jonathan Swift, to Oscar Wilde, to George Bernard Shaw, ... The Savages The story opens in the ridiculously picturesque town of Sun City, Arizona, a haven for retirees (Jenkins opens with an almost Lynchian surreal shot of elderly women in electric blue cheerleader ... The Scarlet Empress [DVD] Josef von Sternberg's sixth of eight collaborations with screen siren Marlene Dietrich, The Scarlet Empress, is a dense, visually astounding portrait a woman evolving from an innocent, ... The Science of Sleep (La Science des rêves) Gondry’s hero and obvious autobiographical stand-in is Stéphane (Gael García Bernal), a dreamy young would-be artist who moves to Paris from Mexico when his mother promises him a place to live ... The Score The Score is a solid piece of old-fashioned genre work starring a brilliantly assembled cast of heavyweight American actors, one from each of the last three generations. The film relies ... The Scorpion King [DVD] One of the most important rules of the modern movie marketplace is that, to be truly successful, a movie must be able to continue life in sequels and spin-offs. Stephen Sommers' The Mummy ... The Screaming Skull [DVD] In the argument of quality versus quantity, producers Roger Corman and Samuel Z. Arkoff happily opted for the latter. Both Corman and Arkoff are hallowed names in the annals of exploitation and ... The Searchers Ethan was Wayne's first anti-heroic role, and his performance is certainly one of the best of his career. "The Searchers" is a landmark Western that is at once a great, rousing adventure story, a ... The Secret of the Grain (La graine et le mulet) [DVD] The story centers around Slimane Beiji (Habib Boufares), the grave, 61-year-old father of a family of Arab immigrants who have made their home in the Mediterranean port city of Séte for the past ... The Sentinel [DVD] The story’s primary plot is derived straight from The Fugitive, with a clearly innocent man who has been falsely accused of a crime simultaneously evading the law and trying to clear his ... The September Issue Thus, I was hoping that The September Issue would shed some real light on the subject in taking us inside both the process of putting together the annual fashion bible and the otherwise ... The Seventh Seal (Det sjunde inseglet) [DVD] The story, which was inspired by the medieval church frescoes by Albertus Pictor, takes place in 14th-century Sweden, and it opens with the return of a well-meaning, soul-searching knight named ... The Shark Is Still Working By turning Dreyfuss’s amusing anecdote about the troubled production on its ear to suggest Jaws’s enduring legacy--the mechanical shark may have had difficulty working, but the film works ... The Shootist [DVD] When, at the age of 69, the legendary John Wayne starred in The Shootist as John Bernard Books, an aging gunslinger dying of cancer at the turn of the 20th century, he himself was dying of ... The Shop on Main Street (Obchod na korze) [DVD] Ever since the horrors of the Holocaust became widely known after the Allied liberation of the concentration camps, one of its most persistent and nagging qualities has been its resistance to ... The Siege That film, which used the recent Gulf War as its backdrop, was the first hint of Zwick's ability to take recent history and mold it into provocative, but accessible and entertaining, cinema. He ... The Silence of the Lambs [Blu-Ray] The film opens with the foreboding, funereal theme music by Howard Shore playing over shots of a young FBI trainee named Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) running through the woods next to the FBI ... The Simpsons Movie The movie's plot is appropriately gargantuan: Perennially dunderheaded patriarch Homer Simpson saves a pig from becoming the next Krusty Burger and turns it into the new family pet (his adoring ... The Sixth Sense M. Night Shyamalan's "The Sixth Sense" is about a little boy named Cole who has been bestowed with a terrible gift: the ability the see dead people. He sees them walking around everywhere, and most ... The Skeleton Key And The Skeleton Key is filled with old things. Its main setting is a decaying mansion on a swampy plantation that is filled with decrepit antiques and moldering artifacts hidden away in ... The Small Back Room [DVD] Based on the novel by Nigel Balchin, The Small Back Room takes place in London in 1943, a literally dark time of constant blackouts and bomb raids. The Germans have started dropping ... The Sound of Music [DVD] Robert Wise's 1965 film version of Rogers and Hammerstein's Broadway musical "The Sound of Music" is one of the greatest examples of the massive divide that often separates film critics from movie ... The Spanish Prisoner This is the heart of the film, and the strength of the con that is played. "The Spanish Prisoner" is the term used to described a "confidence game," where one person plays on another's vanity and ... The Spiderwick Chronicles [Blu-Ray] The film’s young hero is actually two characters: a pair of twins named Jared and Simon Grace, both of whom are played by Freddie Highmore (Finding Neverland). Jared is the rebellious ... The Spirit of the Beehive (El Espíritu de la colmena) [DVD] The Spirit of the Beehive begins with the fabled “Once upon a time ...,â€� suggesting that we are meant to take it more metaphorically than literally. It is set in a specific, yet slightly ... The Spitfire Grill Unfortunately, this fact has only garnered negative press for a film that originally opened to good reviews. It won the Audience Award at the prestigious Sundance Film Festival, and Castle Rock ... The Spy Who Came in From the Cold [DVD] The Spy Who Came in From the Cold is essentially the anti-James Bond. Even though, according to le Carré, it is no less fantastical in content (note, for example, its fantasy version of the ... The Star Chamber "The Star Chamber" lifts that idea of a secretive, backroom court and drops it into a modern setting. It asks, what if a group of powerful, like-minded judges got together and formed their own court ... The Stepford Wives [DVD] When it was first released in 1975, The Stepford Wives was described by many feminists as being misogynistic—that it was a cruel male fantasy about stripping women of their identities and ... The Story of Us At the climax of "The Story of Us," Katie Jordan (Michelle Pfeiffer) has a sudden epiphany, which is followed by a long, tear-soaked monologue in which she explains to her husband, Ben (Bruce ... The Straight Story "The Straight Story" tells the true tale of Alvin Straight, a 73-year-old man who, in 1994, rode a 1966 John Deere riding lawnmover from Laurens, Iowa, to Mt. Zion, Wisconsin--a distance of some 300 ... The Stranger [DVD] The Stranger is often referred to as Orson Welles' least personal film, and judging by the work itself, that is an apt description. A solid piece of postwar genre work about a Nazi ... The Strangers The decidedly simple premise gives us a couple, Kristen (Liv Tyler) and James (Scott Speedman), who are at a pivotal, potential breaking point in their relationship. After attending a wedding they ... The Sum of All Fears Roughly halfway through The Sum of All Fears, the worst thing imaginable happens: A small nuclear weapon placed by terrorists explodes in a major American city, killing tens of thousands of ... The Sweet Hereafter On a cold winter day in a small, isolated town in British Columbia, a school bus full of children slides off the highway and onto a frozen lake, where it cracks through the ice and sinks. Fourteen ... The Sword of Doom (Dai-bosatsu tôge) [DVD] Kihachi Okamoto’s superb samurai drama The Sword of Doom (Dai-bosatsu tôge) also ends on a freeze frame, an evocative, troubling final image of the film’s heinous anti-hero ... The Tailor of Panama Pierce Brosnan is best known today for playing James Bond, the world's most famousBritish superspy, in the last three installments of that long-running series. In JohnBoorman's The Tailor of ... The Taking of Pelham 123 Because of Scott’s reliably indiscriminant overdirection, which he has actually dialed down from his previous films (most notably 2005’s incoherent Domino), The Taking of Pelham ... The Taking of Power by Louis XIV (La prise de pouvoir par Louis XIV) [DVD] The first of Rossellini’s television films was The Taking of Power by Louis XIV (La prise de pouvoir par Louis XIV), which was made for French television but was also given a ... The Talented Mr. Ripley [DVD] Director John Boorman ("Deliverance"), writing about Michael Powell's 1960 film "Peeping Tom," said, "The profound unease we feel in identifying with an evil character in a movie is the recognition ... The Tales of Hoffmann [DVD] The Tales of Hoffmann is a cinematic rendition of an unfinished 1880 opera-ballet by Jacques Offenbach that was based on the works of 19th-century German writer E.T.A. Hoffmann. Offenbach ... The Ten Commandments [DVD] >Cecil B. DeMille’s opulent Technicolor remake of The Ten ... The Tenant (Le Locataire) [DVD] Given the fact that Roman Polanski’s slowly dwindling career has been given an injection of life with his having won both the Palm d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival and the 2002 Best Director ... The Terminal Alas, The Terminal is Spielberg in his happiest of happy modes, and the movie plays like something he tossed off between real projects. There’s nothing wrong with a major director taking a ... The Terminator [DVD] James Cameron's The Terminator is a film that is obsessed with, yet is ultimately about the fear of, machines. ... The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse) [DVD] Take, of instance, his 1933 crime thriller The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse), a sequel to his 1922 smash hit Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler (Dr. Mabuse der ... The Texas Chainsaw Massacre [DVD] > On a short list of the most important horror films of the last 50 years, ... The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning Anyone looking for more details regarding the nightmare-myth of the First Family of Cannibalistic Inbreds--the film does promise "The Beginning," after all--will be sorely disappointed. Yes, you ... The Thief of Bagdad [DVD] Produced during World War II by the great Hungarian-born British filmmaker Alexander Korda, The Thief of Bagdad is certainly a visual marvel, combining virtually every kind of special effect ... The Thin Red Line [DVD] I have the feeling that, because writer/director Terrence Malick disappeared from the film scene for 20 years and became something of a myth--a legend--along the lines of J.D. Salinger, many have ... The Third Man [DVD] Now that I've aired that complaint, I can move into otherwise unbridled praise for Carol Reed's near masterpiece. Written by novelist Graham Greene with his typically keen sense of dialogue and ... The Thirteenth Floor There have been a number of American films in the last few years that have been built on the notion of questioning What is reality? These include "Dark City," which played with the idea of ... The Thomas Crown Affair It's funny how the more things change, the more they stay the ... The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada The screenplay by Guillermo Arriaga uses a nonlinear structure similar to the ones he deployed in his acclaimed films Amores perros(2000) and 21 Grams (2003), which makes the opening ... The Three Marias (As Três Marias) Brazilian director Aluisio Abranches’ The Three Marias (As Três Marias), his second feature film, begins in grisly fashion with the murder of the three men of the Capadócio family. ... The Threepenny Opera (Die 3groschenoper) [DVD] The story in The Threepenny Opera is actually derived from a much older source: John Gay's 1728 The Beggar's Opera, which was also a parody of traditional opera and took place amid the ... The Time Machine When H.G. Wells published the complete text of his novella, The Time Machine, in 1895, it was the first time such a concept had appeared in a fictional story. Time machines and time travel ... The Tin Drum (Die Blechtrommel) [DVD] That filmmaker turned out to be Volker Schlöndorff, a former assistant for French filmmakers Louis Malle, Jean-Pierre Melville, and Alain Resnais who had emerged as one of the brightest cinematic ... The Transporter The Transporter is an almost instantly forgettable European action vehicle with a few relatively good bang-’em-up sequences, a straight-to-video storyline, and a good dose of name cachet ... The Trial [DVD] The Stranger is often referred to as Orson Welles' least personal film, and judging by the work itself, that is an apt description. A solid piece of postwar genre work about a Nazi ... The Triplets of Belleville (Les Triplettes de Belleville) > Sylvain Chomet’s The Triplets of Belleville (Les Triplettes de ... The Truman Show [Blu-Ray] Truman is the unwitting star of The Truman Show, the greatest show on earth--a quasi-combination of soap operas and reality TV. The creator of the show is a man named Christof (Ed Harris), a ... The Truman Show [DVD] Truman is the unwitting star of The Truman Show, the greatest show on earth -- a quasi-combination of soap operas and reality TV. The creator of the show is a man named Christof (Ed Harris), ... The Twilight Saga: Eclipse The story’s melodramatic threads pick up right where New Moon left off, with the vaguely alienated teenage Bella (Kristen Stewart) firmly (yet chastely) in the arms of her vampire boyfriend ... The Twilight Saga: New Moon The story in New Moon picks up where Twilight left off, with teenage Bella (Stewart) in love with Edward Cullen (Robert Pattison), a 109-year-old vampire who looks like a lusty high ... The Two of Us (Le vieil homme et l'enfant) [DVD] And that is, above all else, what The Two of Us is: gentle. It does not, however, take place in a gentle time and place. Rather, the story unfolds during the worst years of World War II, when ... The Unborn But, I get ahead of myself. Goyer doesn’t waste a second of screen time before launching us into creepiness, with the college-age heroine Casey Beldon (Odette Yustman, last seen escaping the ... The Untouchables [DVD] According to producer Art Linson, as told in Laurent Bouzereau's book The De Palma Cut, the sequence as written was to involve a great deal of costly, elaborate effects that the production ... The Upside of Anger [DVD] Allen, shaking off years of playing repressed characters, lets it all hang out in her portrayal of Terry, a woman so resolutely angry and frustrated that she withdraws from the world, as if she’s ... The Vanishing (Spoorloos) [DVD] (Warning: The Vanishing has one of the most justly famous endings in recent cinema, and as it is difficult to fully discuss the film's merits without mentioning what it is, I recommend ... The Verdict [DVD] The protagonist in The Verdict is Frank Galvin (Paul Newman), a once notable Boston lawyer whose personal tragedies have driven him to alcoholism and a reliance on funerals to dig up new ... The Village Unfortunately, those audience expectations are exactly what have been built up into a fever pitch by the marketing campaign surrounding his newest film, The Village, and it largely backfires ... The Virgin Spring (Jungfrukällan) [DVD] In many ways, The Virgin Spring is a slight, almost rudimentary film--a sparse narrative of vengeance and atonement--but its very simplicity is what strikes chords. The narrative’s source ... The Virgin Suicides [DVD] Sofia Coppola's directorial debut, "The Virgin Suicides," is a hazy, dream-like tale of how the local teenage boys of a wealthy Michigan suburb in the early 1970s view the Lisbon sisters. These five ... The Visitor A small, intimate character study with broad post-9/11 thematic relevance by actor-turned-filmmaker Thomas McCarthy (The Station Agent), The Visitor cast Jenkins as Walter Vale, a ... The Wages of Fear (La Salaire de la peur) [DVD] The opening passages of The Wages of Fear are lengthy and slowly placed, as Clouzot uses them to establish his main characters, as well as a sense of time grinding along at a pace that would ... The War of the Roses [DVD] The story Gavin tells is one of divorce—of how, after 18 years of marriage, Oliver (Michael Douglas) and Barbara (Kathleen Turner) Rose grew to resent each other to the point of sheer mayhem. The ... The War of the Worlds (1953) [DVD] There had been science fiction movies before The War of the Worlds, even doomsday scenarios like Pal’s When Worlds Collide (1951) and Robert Wise’s cautionary fable The Day the ... The Warriors: Director's Cut [DVD] The movie takes place over one night in New York City. It opens with an enormous rally in the Bronx attended by all the major New York gangs. This meeting has been organized by Cyrus (Roger Hill), ... The Wasp Woman [DVD] The Giant Gila Monster may have been the perfect make-out movie. After all, as a low-budget, B-movie sci-fi/horror hybrid aimed directly at the insatiable teenage market, it played ... The Watcher "The Watcher" is a serial killer thriller that, like "The Silence of the Lambs" (1991), isultimately about the unusual relationship between a killer and an FBI agent. "The Watcher"attempts to further ... The Waterboy Sandler stars as Bobby Boucher, a childlike 31-year-old man who learns to channel the aggressive energy accumulated from years of torment into incredible football hitting prowess (his physicality is ... The Way of the Gun From its earliest inception, the movies have engaged in an ongoing love affair with thecriminal. The most popular genres--the Western, the gangster flick, film noir--all revolvedaround criminals as ... The Wedding Singer The object of Robby's affection is Julia Sullivan (Drew Barrymore), an equally sweet waitress engaged to a womanizing lunk named Glenn Gulia (Matthew Glave). Robby, who knows more about weddings than ... The White Ribbon (Das weisse Band - Eine deutsche Kindergeschichte) [Blu-Ray] Like Caché (2005), Haneke’s film about a sophisticated Parisian couple being tormented by mysterious surveillance videotapes of their house, The White Ribbon takes the ostensible ... The Wicker Man Nicolas Cage stars as Edward Malus, a dedicated cop who is traumatized by his failure to save a mother and her daughter from a fiery car wreck. His chance for redemption arrives in the form of an ... The Wild Oh, sure, there are important differences. For example, the giraffe in Madagascar is a hypochondriac voiced nervously by David Schwimmer, whereas the giraffe in The Wild is a saucy ... The Wild Bunch: Director's Cut Although all of Peckinpah's films are important in one way or another, "The Wild Bunch" clearly stands out among them as his master achievement. "The Wild Bunch" is not only Peckinpah's best film, ... The Winslow Boy David Mamet, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and filmmaker who has created an indelible name for himself writinghard-hitting modern American dramas and complex mysteries involving con games, ... The Witch Who Came From the Sea [DVD] The Witch Who Came From the Sea is such a film. It presents itself as a serious psychological drama about the plight of an emotionally damaged woman, yet it contains enough graphic depictions ... The Wolfman Over the past 20 years each of the Universal monsters has been given a Hollywood big-screen resurrection, some more successful than others. It began in 1992 with Francis Ford Coppola’s opulent ... The Woman in Green [DVD] Sherlock Holmes has been one of the most persistently depicted characters in all of cinema history. Along with Count Dracula, there is no other literary creation who has enjoyed success in more ... The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl This complex existence is the subject of writer/director Ray Mueller's engrossing documentary "The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl." Running over three hours in length (which is a little ... The Woodsman Thus, it is always a genuine shock when a film features a criminal protagonist who complicates our innate desires to identify with him. In The Woodsman, Kevin Bacon plays such a character, a ... The World According to Garp Instead, it just seems to waver between almost sitcom-like normality, and bizarre outlandishness. One minute we have a character staring doe-eyed at his children, speaking lovingly about the joys of ... The World is Not Enough "Somehow, the whole art of intrigue has been lost in a giant fireball," I bemoaned back in 1997 after viewing the Schwarzenegger-ization of James Bond in "Tomorrow Never Dies." Now, two years later, ... The Wrestler [Blu-Ray] Yet, for all the formidable elements of Randy’s presence, these tracking shots also have in them an element of sadness and an emphasis on what has been lost. In form, they replicate the cliché ... The X Files: Fight the Future [Blu-Ray] However, when pressed it’s difficult to think of a television show outside of Star Trek that has spawned a theatrical movie, but that is exactly what Twentieth Century Fox decided to do in ... The X-Files: I Want to Believe Making his feature film directorial debut, Carter has delivered a dark, murky, and wintry film that feels like an odd fit for the summer movie season, even one dominated by the nihilism of The ... Theatre of Blood [DVD] William Shakespeare is probably the most sadistically violent author to still be taught on a regular basis in public schools. Dressed up in undeniably beautiful poetry, his plays features a litany ... There Was a Father (Chichi ariki) [DVD] There Was a Father follows the relationship of a widowed father named Shuhei Horikawa (Chishu Ryu) and his son Ryohei (Shuji Sano) over a 15-year period. When we first meet them, Ryohei is a ... There Will Be Blood [Blu-Ray] In those wordless 15 opening minutes, Anderson sets up both the narrative and the world in which it will inhabit--a world of competition, danger, and sudden, vicious violence from above. It’s an ... There Will Be Blood [DVD] In those wordless 15 opening minutes, Anderson sets up both the narrative and the world in which it will inhabit--a world of competition, danger, and sudden, vicious violence from above. It's an ... There's Something About Mary Since 1994's "Dumb and Dumber," The Farrelly Brothers (Peter and Bobby) have been making gross-out humor their stock-in-trade. "Dumb and Dumber" had its funny/sick moments, including the selling of ... They Might Be Giants [DVD] The title "They Might Be Giants" is a reference to Don Quixote and his battle with a series of windmills that he mistook for giants. The line is uttered by a retired judge named Justin Playfair ... Thieves' Highway [DVD] Richard Conte, by this point a full-blooded, hard-boiled movie star, plays Nick Garcos, a young man who has just returned from a few years abroad making money after serving in World War II. In ... Thirteen Days [DVD] In a lean, tense two and a half hours, Roger Donaldson's Thirteen Days tells the story of the inner workings in the White House during the Cuban Missile Crisis, one of the most severe ... This Is It [Blu-Ray] However, during the rehearsals from April to June 2009, videographers shot some 170 hours of footage that was intended to be used as part of the preparation process. This footage is now Jackson’s ... This Is Spinal Tap [DVD] Now that VH-1's "Behind the Music" and other rockumentaries are an increasingly regular part of the cable TV landscape, Rob Reiner's directorial debut, the 1984 mock documentary "This Is Spinal ... Three Days of the Condor [DVD] Robert Redford stars as Joe Turner, code-named Condor, a low-level CIA worker whose job is reading books and looking for plots that resemble actual CIA intelligence work. After Turner inadvertently ... Three Kings A lot of bodies get hit by a lot of bullets in movies these days. And a lot of those movies don't take much time to contemplate what it means to be struck by a bullet--the violence of the impact ... Throne of Blood (Kumonosu jo) [DVD] Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood, a re-envisioning of William Shakespeare’s Macbeth through the historical lens of feudal Japan and the aesthetic conventions of the Noh Theater, is ... THX 1138 As a result, executives ordered that five minutes be trimmed from the film, and it was given virtually no marketing support. When it was eventually released in 1971, it sank, but Lucas did not. He ... Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (¡Atame!) It's lines like this that make this deranged black comedy work despite its shortcomings because you never have any doubt that he means it. It's humorous in that scathing Almodovar manner because the ... Tigerland [DVD] As Vice President Al Gore had to carry the weight of Bill Clinton's scandal-ridden eight-year term as President on his back during his own Presidential campaign, Tigerland, a gritty, moody, ... Time Bandits [Blu-Ray] The brilliance of Time Bandits and the reason it continues to speak so eloquently to open-minded viewers of any age is its radical sense of juxtaposition and boundary blurring (I can speak ... Titan A.E. [DVD] "Titan A.E." is an imaginative, highly ambitious animated science fiction yarn. Aside from the characters, almost everything in the film is computer animated, which puts it in direct competition ... Titanic [DVD] When it left the English dock headed for America in April 1912, it had more than 2,000 passengers, ranging from some of the wealthiest people in the world down to poor Irish immigrants hoping to ... Titus [DVD] William Shakespeare's "Titus Andronicus" was pure Grand Guignol 300 years before Oscar Méténier invented the infamous Parisian theatrical concoction of overwrought melodrama, twisting ... To Catch a Thief [DVD] To Catch a Thief has never been one of Hitchcock’s greatest films. Described by Donald Spoto in The Art of Alfred Hitchcock as “a creampuff of a movie with a little suspense at the ... To the Devil a Daughter [DVD] When To the Devil a Daughter was released in 1976, it was the last feature film produced by the great Hammer studio, which had produced more than 180 films since the early 1950s, in the ... Together (Tillsammans) Lukas Moodyson's Together (Tillsammans) takes place in a hippie commune in Stockholm in 1975. A small group of people whose ideologies of life fall outside of the mainstream, yet are ... Tokyo Olympiad (Tokyo orimpikku) [DVD] Tokyo Olympiad (Tokyo orimpikku), Kon Ichikawa's deeply humanistic documentary of the 1964 Olympic games in Tokyo, Japan, almost wasn't. Initially rejected as "too artistic" by the ... Tokyo Story (Tokyo Monogatari) [DVD] Tokyo Story (Tokyo Monogatari) is Japanese filmmaker’s Yasujiro Ozu’s best-known film (it ranked in Sight & Sound’s influential 10 greatest films ever made list in 1992 ... Tomorrow Never Dies Whatever happened to insurgent political evils? They're as passe as the Cold War. Slimy South American drug lords? That was back when Timothy Dalton was still holding the Walter PB-K. For today's ... Top Gun [DVD] The film, which takes it title from the nickname given to the Miramar Fighter Weapons School in Miramar, California, established in 1969 to teach the lost art of dogfighting to the best Navy pilots, ... Topsy-Turvy [DVD] Mike Leigh's "Topsy-Turvy" is a visually sumptuous film about the last phase of the partnership between William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan, the respective lyricist and composer who, from ... Tout va bien [DVD] That may sound like a meaningless distinction, but there is a difference. Political films cannot be anything but; their very subject matter and mode of production guarantee that they will be ... Toy Story 2 [Blu-Ray] Toy Story 2 expands and builds upon the story and characters from the groundbreaking original in a way that is both meaningful and fun, which is why it is such great entertainment. Originally ... Toy Story 3 Like all the best sequels, Toy Story 3 builds upon and deepens the characters, relationships, and themes that fueled the previous entries in the series (1995’s Toy Story and 1999’s ... Toy Story [Blu-Ray] The first fully computer-animated feature film, Toy Story was something of a gamble back in the mid-1990s for the small Steve Jobs-owned upstart named Pixar and the venerable Walt Disney ... Trading Places [DVD] Trading Places is what you might imagine a Frank Capra film would be like if it were reimagined for the Reagan era and starring a couple of stand-out comedians from Saturday Night ... Traffic [DVD] This point is most caustic when, near the end, Robert Wakefield (Michael Douglas), a well-respected Ohio supreme court justice who has been picked to fill the chief position in the U.S. Office of ... Trafic [DVD] However, Hulot also appeared in a fourth film, 1971’s Trafic, which even Tati’s most ardent admirers are forced to admit is a significantly lesser film than those that preceded it, which ... Training Day Training Day is one of those movies that starts off very well, gets increasingly better as it goes along, and then suddenly deflates as it shoots itself in the foot in the final stretch. An ... Trainspotting Transformers '80s nostalgia demands a certain reverence for the robot-alien characters, who come from the planet Cybertron and disguise themselves on Earth by transforming into cars, trucks, airplanes, and, in ... Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen What is most despairing about this situation is not that it reflects some significant divide between high-brow critics and low-brow audience taste. From what I can gather, most of the people who are ... Transsiberian Harrelson’s Roy and his photographer wife, Jessie (Emily Mortimer), have been working with orphans in China and decide to take a grand adventure by riding the Transsiberian Express, which is an ... Trekkies Did Gene Roddenberry know? Did he have any idea what he was unleashing when he created "Star Trek," a sci-fi TV series that started in 1966 and was canceled after three years of dismal ratings? Did ... Tropic of Cancer For those who have not read "Tropic of Cancer," it is a rollicking, cantankerous, often moving account of the author's unashamedly bawdy adventures as an expatriate in Paris during the Great ... Tropic Thunder [Blu-Ray] The idea is that a first-time director (Steve Coogan) is already overbudget and up to his neck in delays while shooting a Vietnam war epic on location (the Apocalypse Now references are so ... Trouble in Paradise [DVD] Ernst Lubitsch was a German émigré who began as a silent film actor and became one of the most celebrated and popular Hollywood directors of the 1930s and early ’40s. The reason for his ... Troy Thus, central to Troy is Achilles, the film's most physically attractive character, played by Brad Pitt as both buff and tortured. Achilles is a rouge warrior who fights for King Agamemnon ... True Crime Although Eastwood is 69 and looks about 10 years older, his investigative reporter character has recently lost his job for getting caught with his editor's underage daughter ("She looked 18"), he ... True Grit [DVD] John Wayne had starred in more than 130 movies by the time he won the 1970 Academy Award for Best Actor for his role as the overweight, aging, one-eyed, surly, hard-drinking Federal Marshal ... Trust the Man [DVD] The story gives us two comfortably affluent New York couples: Tom (David Duchovny) and Rebecca (Julianne Moore) and Tobey (Billy Crudup) and Elaine (Maggie Gyllenhaal). Tom has given up an ... Tumbleweeds "Tumbleweeds" is about the texture and uneven rhythm of life, chronicling the desperate plight of a single mother named Mary Jo, who is caught in an endless cycle of bad boyfriends, and how she and ... Tunes of Glory [DVD] There are several tensions in Tunes of Glory, all of which are manifested in the relationship between Sinclair and Barrow (John Mills), two middle-aged officers who are firmly set in their ... Twenty-Four Eyes (Nijushi no hitomi) [DVD] Based on the popular novel by Sakae Tsuboi, Twenty-Four Eyes opens in 1928 with the arrival of the fresh-faced Hisako Oishi (Hideko Takamine) in a small fishing village on Shodoshima, the ... Twilight The tone of Hardwicke’s film lies in a highly stylized, moody netherworld between starry teen fantasy and brooding gothic melodrama in the vein of Emily Brönte, which makes for an awkward, albeit ... Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me [DVD] One thing that David Lynch does consistently well is confound and perplex audience expectations. Many of his films are consciously structured to draw the audience in one direction before suddenly ... Twister Having said that, let me quickly praise Industrial Light and Magic for the outstanding job it did on the visual effects in this film. The computer-generated tornadoes rushing across the Oklahoma ... Two Girls and a Guy Director/writer Toback churned out the script in only four days right after he saw his friend, actor Robert Downey Jr., in a Los Angeles court room after being busted for drugs. The two had ... Two-Lane Blacktop [DVD] Director Monte Hellman, a B-movie veteran from the same Roger Corman school of filmmaking that produced Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese, has described Two-Lane Blacktop as “the ...  ( 1 2 3 4 5 8 9 A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

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