Writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson (Boogie Nights, Magnolia) and unlikely star Adam Sandler team up for the best film in either of their careers. As Barry Egan, a shy small-business owner given to fits of rage, Sandler dials down his manic persona a notch or two, bringing it a bit closer to real life. Meanwhile, Anderson’s

City Lights, in which Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp pursues a blind girl (Virginia Cherrill) who sells flowers on the sidewalk, doesn’t have the thematic coherence of Modern Times, but there are touches of Chaplin’s sensibility nonetheless. His disdain for labor is evident, especially when the Tramp takes a job cleaning up after horses in the

Another cinematic grenade from Spike Lee, this time aimed at those who perpetuate African-American stereotypes in the entertainment industry. Damon Wayans stars as a television producer who creates a modern-day minstrel show hoping to get fired. Instead, America goes into a craze for blackface. Outrageous? Yes, but it’s also a searing indictment of today’s misogynistic

Writer-director Kevin Smith’s flimsiest film – a road comedy featuring the two crude, New Jersey slackers who have popped up in all of his movies – also may be his funniest, at least to the chosen few. In an admirable gesture of independence, Smith makes movies only for loyal fans of his sophomoric sensibility, not

Martin Lawrence stars in this mean-spirited farce about an FBI agent who goes undercover as a rotund Southern grandma. The movie awkwardly jumps from one uninspired gag about the title character’s size to the next. If you get your kicks by laughing at overweight people, this will be 95 minutes of rip-roarin’ fun.

A sweet romance in a tasteless joke’s clothing, the Farrelly brothers’ latest farce follows a self-deluded skirt-chaser (Jack Black) who is hypnotized so that he sees people for their inner beauty; hence the overweight Peace Corps volunteer he meets looks to him like Gwyneth Paltrow. If this makes you uncomfortable, it’s supposed to – Shallow

A merry melodrama about comic-opera geniuses Gilbert and Sullivan, this period piece should be a delight for anyone who’s ever been involved in musical theater (or has seen The Pirates of Penzance a dozen times). Director Mike Leigh takes material that’s seemingly suited for Masterpiece Theater and injects it with radiance, relevance and life.

At 146 minutes, Steven Spielberg’s epic misfire is too long to qualify as a fascinating train wreck; even its spectacular badness grows wearying. As it speculates on the riotous paranoia that strikes Los Angeles in the days after Pearl Harbor, 1941 throws gobs of money and special effects at the screen and strains for laughs