Narc gets most of its fire from a riveting Ray Liotta. As a hard-core narcotics officer hell-bent on avenging his former partner’s murder, he lumbers through the movie like a bear that everyone else on screen is afraid of rousing. He and Jason Patric, who plays an undercover cop, turn the movie into a tense

A cloying martyr movie, Veronica Guerin is all the more shameful because it’s based on an actual person. In the 1990s, Dublin journalist Guerin published extensive exposes on the drug rings in the city, eventually paying with her life. Cate Blanchett has the right sort of fire to bring some dignity to the proceedings, but

As in his little-known, independent efforts George Washington and All the Real Girls, director David Gordon Green specializes in capturing the idiosyncratic flickers in life that never leave us. Undertow traces the legacy of violence handed down from one generation of men to another when an ex-con (Josh Lucas) pays a visit to his brother

Havana Nights adds tropical heat to what already was, in the 1987 original, an overheated story. Set in 1958 Cuba, the movie follows an American high-schooler (Romola Garai) who moves with her family to Havana and finds excitement with a busboy (Diego Luna). It’s often silly, but the music and dancing are infectious, and there’s

A riveting dramatization of a story that mainly made waves in journalism circles: the exposure of the fraudulent career of New Republic magazine writer Stephen Glass, who made up a good chunk of his stories. Thanks to a revelatory performance by Hayden Christensen (Star Wars: Episode II and III), this becomes an engrossing study of

The transformation Imelda Staunton undergoes in this period drama is astounding – all the more so because it doesn’t involve tricks such as makeup or weight loss. From British realist Mike Leigh (Secrets & Lies), Vera Drake follows a prim and proper housecleaner in 1950s England who performs abortions for poor women on the side

A straightforward adaptation of Billie Letts’ popular novel that unfortunately retains all of the book’s emotional manipulation, forced quirkiness and out-of-place brutality. Natalie Portman stars as a pregnant 17-year-old who lives in an Oklahoma Wal-Mart; Ashley Judd is on hand as her long-suffering friend, whose abuse mostly comes at the hands of stereotypical men.

How do you turn historical theology into gripping cinema? According to Luther, haul out the fancy clothes. A biopic about the life of Martin Luther (Joseph Fiennes) – the 16th-century monk who split apart the Catholic church by arguing Christians earned salvation by faith, not works – Luther is a staid, somber costume epic whose

A genial if syrupy crowd pleaser from China, Together follows a rural father (Liu Peiqi) and son (Tang Yun) who move to Beijing to further the boy’s violin education. Much of this is broad, from the father’s clownish behavior to a finale that overflows with tears. Yet director Chen Kaige (Farewell My Concubine) manages some