Like Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York, this Brazilian film chronicles a community that succumbs to chaos – specifically the Rio de Janeiro slum of the title. Unlike Gangs, however, City of God juggles with a fleet sense of flair the very things that bogged Scorsese’s opus down: a huge cast of characters, an expansive

The absurdities of Enough – in which Jennifer Lopez plays a browbeaten wife who becomes a trained fighter in hopes of killing her abusive husband – are endless, but what’s most galling about the film is the way it patronizes the issue at hand. Enough wants to be both a cathartic, cinematic punch and a

Often cited by critics and historians as one of the cinema’s all-time greats, Au Hasard Balthazar takes a simple premise reminiscent of Black Beauty and expands on it with devotion and reverence. The movie follows the life of a donkey named Balthazar who is buffeted from one owner to the next, encountering much hardship, a

Terrence Malick had a fluid naturalism in his debut feature, a loose dramatization of the Charles Starkweather-Caril Anne Fugate killing spree of the late 1950s. This is largely another of Malick’s impressionistic tales of paradise lost, but here the dreamy approach feels fresh and exciting. As it follows Starkweather/Fugate stand-ins Kit (Martin Sheen) and Holly

It’s hard to describe The Thin Red Line, the return of Terrence Malick to directing after a 20-year absence, as anything but exquisitely beautiful, despite the fact that it largely traces the awful violence experienced and perpetuated by a band of American soldiers on the Pacific island of Guadalcanal during World War II. This is