Mandy Moore’s teen melodrama features a birth, a death, a funeral and a wedding, yet it handles such swooning material with something that can almost be called tact. Add the star’s willingness to play a teen with a brain and you get enough genuine moments to make the soap-opera tendencies forgivable.

Nothing new for writer-director Terrence Malick (Badlands, The Thin Red Line), whose pet subject – mankind’s despoiling of an Edenic setting – is here transferred to the legend of John Smith (Colin Farrell) and Pocahontas (Q’Orianka Kilcher). The tale may be perfectly suited to Malick’s languorous cinematography and portentous voice-over narration, but by now these

Winner of 2006’s Best Foreign Film Oscar, this thug-rehabilitation movie goes to exaggerated lengths to redeem its criminal antihero. Presley Chweneyagae gives a riveting performance as a thieving teen who steals a woman’s car without realizing her baby is in the back seat. A crisis of conscience ensues, as well as a crash course in

Anyone who’s ever been part of a wedding will enjoy the way director Mira Nair captures the giddy chaos surrounding such an occasion, even if the titular event here takes place in contemporary India. The movie focuses on a four-day celebration of an arranged marriage between a young New Delhi woman and an engineer from

Jennifer Lopez unwisely tries to dominate this otherwise charming remake of a 1996 Japanese film, even though it is supposed to be about a man (Richard Gere) who solves his midlife crisis by secretly taking dancing lessons, not about how sexy his instructor (Lopez) is. As long the movie focuses on Gere’s character – his

An enchanting ending redeems this otherwise familiar story of contemporary society clashing with traditional culture. Whale Rider takes place in a coastal tribal community of New Zealand, where a young girl (Oscar-nominated Keisha Castle-Hughes) challenges the gender biases that have governed her people for generations. Writer-director Niki Caro fares better capturing the cascading green hills

Another Clint Eastwood essay on the aging process disguised as a genre film. The gray hero he plays here is a top FBI agent who retires after a successful heart transplant, only to return to crime-solving when the sister of the murdered woman whose heart he received shows up demanding he track down the donor’s

An epic sob story about a real-life drug dealer (Johnny Depp) who flooded the United States with cocaine in the ’70s and is now sitting in jail. Blow isn’t content to paint a conflicted portrait of an anti-hero, but instead verges on hero worship. It’s a misguided movie at best, a distasteful one at heart.

An unsuccessful prestige project based on Charles Frazier’s 1998 best-seller, this is a movie with pages sticking out of it. The story is good; the structural problems are insurmountable. Nicole Kidman and Jude Law cancel each other out as lovers separated by the Civil War, while Renee Zellweger brings some zest as a rifle-toting drifter.