This martial-arts drama seems to have been made with one of those jumbo packs of crayons – costumes, landscapes and interior design all burst with vibrant hues. Acclaimed director Zhang Yimou (Raise the Red Lantern) assembles a glittering roster of Asian acting talent, including Jet Li, (Romeo Must Die), Zhang Ziyi (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon),

Japanese animation master Hayao Miyazaki (Princess Mononoke) delivers another bewildering and beautiful film fantasy. The title edifice – which is called a castle but actually resembles a medieval hamlet perched on gargantuan mechanical chicken legs – is the sort of burst of imagination that opens your eyes in wonder. The complicated story, based on a

Attack of the Clones is great, mostly for the way it makes the original three episodes of writer-director George Lucas’ ongoing space sage even greater. A prequel full of ominous foreshadowing and detailed background, Clones has the ingenious special effects and dazzling action to work brilliantly as a popcorn movie, while its resonance in relation

George Lucas’ Star Wars series, whose six movies have been spread over nearly 30 years, is one of the rare motion-picture experiences epic enough – in the Homeric, not the Ridley Scottish, sense – to attain a literary resonance. This brooding finale serves as both the capper to the franchise and the bridge between the

Almost as ambitious in scope as his Titanic, James Cameron’s The Abyss is a more nuanced melding of large-scale action and intimate romance. When a U.S. nuclear submarine disappears into the ocean canyon that an oil crew is working above, a brusque team of Navy Seals arrives to perform a supposed rescue mission that may

John Wayne took on Davy Crockett’s coonskin cap and directorial duties for this epic take on the famed Texas battle. The film’s nearly three hours are stuffed with showy vistas, corny speeches and static battle scenes in which size seems to be the only thing that matters. The result was seven Oscar nominations, including Best

Emotional therapy hasn’t been this action-packed since The Sopranos. If this crackling action comedy, about a pair of married assassins (Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt) who are both unaware of the other’s lethal profession, falters at all, it is by overworking its underlying theme of marital strife. The similar The Incredibles was far more effortless,

Producer-star DMX clearly means to be playing an antihero here, but even he seems unaware of just how poisonously misogynistic his movie is. He plays a drug dealer whose most heinous habit is to woo women, get them hooked and then murder them when they threaten to call the police. The seething hatred just sits