Shadow of the Vampire (2000)

Drama Rated R

Playing fast and loose with the facts behind the making of 1922’s Nosferatu – German director F.W. Murnau’s silent adaptation of Dracula – Shadow of the Vampire posits that the movie’s otherworldly star, Max Schreck, was a bloodsucker in real life. Aided by a bravura title performance from Willem Dafoe – his Schreck is a

Far From Heaven (2002)

Drama Rated PG-13

A limited if striking exercise from writer-director Todd Haynes, who employs the heightened style of the 1950s suburban melodramas of director Douglas Sirk. Julianne Moore plays a 1957 housewife who enters into a taboo friendship with her black gardener (Dennis Haysbert) just as her marriage is falling apart. The plot – along with the swooning

Simone (2002)

Drama Rated PG-13

Another provocative picture from filmmaker Andrew Niccol (writer-director of Gattaca and writer of The Truman Show), Simone claims it doesn’t take much to be a star. Sometimes, as happens here when a washed-up movie director (Al Pacino) creates a computer-generated actress, you don’t even have to exist. Simone exposes the hollowness of celebrity culture with

Fog, The (1980)

Horror Rated R

John Carpenter has described this ghost story as a “little exploitation horror movie,” but even by those standards it’s pretty much a bust. As shipwreck victims from 100 years ago haunt a historic town on the Pacific Ocean, Carpenter’s ensemble cast of random characters – including Jamie Lee Curtis as a drifter, her real-life mother

Sin City (2005)

Action/Adventure Rated R

Robert Rodriguez’s Sin City turns Frank Miller’s extremely graphic graphic novels into a grisly, galvanizing update of film noir fatalism. What happens in Sin City – encompassed in three intertwining stories populated by shady cops, cruel murderers and vengeful hookers – feels like what might have been going on in those 1940s and ’50s crime

Good Night, and Good Luck (2005)

Drama Rated PG

This striking, black-and-white drama believes in something perhaps only the child of a former television news anchor – which co-writer/director George Clooney is – could believe in: that TV news can save the nation. A brisk dramatization of broadcaster Edward R. Murrow’s on-air challenges to the anti-communist campaign of Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy, Clooney’s movie

Sixth Sense, The (1999)

Horror Rated PG-13

With the pace and feel of an early-evening shadow creeping across the floor, this 1999 feature from writer-director M. Night Shyamalan announced the emergence of a bracing and assured talent. Haley Joel Osment – whose face has the decaying cuteness of a jack-o’-lantern the day after Halloween – proves riveting as a boy who sees

Home on the Range (2004)

Family Rated PG

A minor Disney effort, Home on the Range relies heavily on the eternal charm of farm animals. You loved them as a 2-year-old, you’ll like them well enough here. A touch of absurdity also helps, starting with the goofy plot: Three cows – voiced by Judi Dench, Roseanne Barr and Jennifer Tilly – set out

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004)

Action/Adventure Rated PG

The first true comic-book movie, even though it is based on an original story, this wildly inventive adventure from novice writer-director Kerry Conran captures the way that adolescent art form looks and, especially, feels. The actors – including Jude Law as a pilot battling giant robots circa 1939 and Gwyneth Paltrow as a plucky reporter

Iris (2001)

Drama Rated R

Unlike A Beautiful Mind, this biographical account of a great thinker’s battle with their own deteriorating intellect is aloof and uninvolving; disease remains at a distance. As lauded British novelist Iris Murdoch (Judi Dench) succumbs to Alzheimer’s, we’re mostly left with images of a doddering, depressed woman – pitiful scenes with no real purpose other