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.

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