I have to believe that Hustle & Flow, which was picked up by Paramount Classics at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival, was subjected to some heavy meddling on the way to mainstream theaters. I can’t remember another movie that started out so confidently, so utterly sure of its own swagger, and then limped so erratically

Scorsese’s fourth feature and his modern tribute, in a sense, to the classic Hollywood women’s picture. Scorsese has always been a film lover first and a filmmaker second, and so it’s appropriate that Alice opens with a striking visual homage to the likes of Gone with the Wind. Florid titles, elegant camerawork and a Technicolor

A stunning, stylistic depiction of addiction in which a son (Jared Leto) and his girlfriend (Jennifer Connelly) succumb to heroin and cocaine while his mother (a staggering Ellyn Burstyn) gets hooked on diet pills in a desperate attempt to lose weight. Writer-director Darren Aronofsky (Pi) has developed a cinematic shorthand of quick edits and frantic

Blue Car has a firm grip on its lead character – a troubled high-school English student, played with spot-on sullenness by Agnes Bruckner – but it isn’t quite sure how to handle the rest of its players. The movie is an ensemble piece when its true calling is to be a character study. This is

An astonishing act of cinema and anthropology, Atanarjuat dramatizes an ancient legend of the Inuit people of the Canadian Arctic. The story traces the life of a hunter (Natar Ungalaaq) whose devotion to the community contrasts with the greed of the tribal leader’s son. As their lifelong feud illuminates the repercussions of breaking a society’s

Director Paul Schrader and star Greg Kinnear turn what could have been a big-screen True Hollywood Story – in this case the life of Hogan’s Heroes star and sex addict Bob Crane – into a fascinating portrait of a tortured personality. The groping on display has the sad desperation of a junkie shooting up in