Even at his best – Lone Star, Limbo, Sunshine State – independent writer-director John Sayles tends to get preachy. Look out, then, when he decides to take the pulpit. This dull yet hectoring political drama, which follows a gubernatorial campaign in Colorado, is so strident and obvious it makes Fahrenheit 9/11 look like a calm

An experimental exercise from director Gus Van Sant, who wrote the screenplay with stars Matt Damon and Casey Affleck, Gerry follows two friends as they get lost on a desert trail and encounter thirst, desperation and … ? Well, not exactly transcendence, although that’s clearly what the movie is aiming for. Some moments approach such

More cable fare from Hilary Duff, Raise Your Voice essentially spends its entire running time trying to convince Duff of her wonderful singing abilities. She plays a sweet-natured teen who loves to belt it out with her school choir until a series of orchestrated tragedies and plot complications strips her of love for music. For

The same problems I had with E. Annie Proulx’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel – an inert main character, an overdone sense of misery – aren’t solved in this adaptation, which stars Kevin Spacey as a dull doormat who starts a new life in his ancestral home of Newfoundland after the death of his poisonously vindictive wife.

This Bosnian import, which won the Best Foreign Language Film award at the 2002 Oscars, takes place almost entirely within a battlefield trench where a Bosnian and a Serb find themselves in a tense standoff. The ensuing morality play at times turns preachy, but it also offers a glimpse at the fractious hatred that allowed

In 1931, three biracial girls were removed from their Aboriginal families by the Australian government as part of a program meant to “civilize” them. Escaping from their captors, the children walked more than 1,200 miles back to their home, mostly by following an endless fence meant to keep rabbits out of farmland. Director Phillip Noyce

Director Ron Howard’s period drama takes an undeniably inspiring based-on-fact story – that of Depression-era boxer James Braddock (Russell Crowe), whose career saw an unlikely resurgence when fighting became the only way he could feed his family – and admirably lets the story tell itself. The facts have enough uplift here to override the need

It’s hard to decide who’s more dull here: Kevin Costner or his movie. Costner stars as a doctor whose late pediatrician wife tries to contact him through her former patients, but the film can’t manage either the open-hearted romanticism of Ghost or the subtle spookiness of The Sixth Sense. Instead, director Tom Shadyac proves to

A remedial-course version of Dead Poets Society, this manages just enough good will of its own to excuse any lack of innovation. Kevin Kline stars as William Hundert, one of those boarding-school instructors who spends so much time inspiring his students you wonder if he ever does any actual teaching. Watching him may feel a

Disney’s fact-based, sports-movie formula has become so drowsily familiar by now that watching another one of these films nearly serves as a sedative – if not outright anesthesia. The only thing wrong with Glory Road – a dramatization of the 1966 season of the Texas Western basketball team, which was the first to start five