This is the loosest, freest film Sean Penn has done as a director, perhaps because he’s made a movie about one man’s heedless quest for personal freedom. It’s a beautiful match of mood and material, and a major step forward for Penn as a filmmaker. Based on Jon Krakauer’s nonfiction book of the same name,

“There is something subversive going on here, though you have to be willing to poke fun of your own reading habits in order to see it.

Set in the midst of the Iraq war, this contemporary morality play from writer-director Paul Haggis (Crash) follows a veteran (Tommy Lee Jones) searching for his soldier son, who has gone missing since returning home from the front. It’s a bleak emotional landscape, scarred by the trauma of conflicts past and present. Haggis may be

“Few things are as boring as a piece of art porn that pays penance for its titillating scenes with twice as many dull ones.

“…the definitive mafia epic.”

“If you’ve ever rushed your kids from preschool to swimming lessons while a granola bar in the car serves as lunch for everyone along the way, this will be an irresistible guilty pleasure.

“Wanda De Jesus’ Pam Grier-worthy performance is the life force of the film. She’s like a domestic Foxy Brown.

A movie primer of sorts on newspaper reporting – though not nearly in the same league as All the President’s Men – Resurrecting the Champ might be one of those pictures better appreciated by denizens of a newsroom than anyone else. Josh Hartnett plays a sports reporter who encounters a former boxing legend (Samuel L.