Director Ron Howard adds to his eclectic filmography with this mystical Western, in which a 19th-century single mother (Cate Blanchett) reluctantly teams up with a man from her past (Tommy Lee Jones) to retrieve her kidnapped daughter. Blanchett goes beyond the cliche of the hardy pioneer woman to create a fierce, survivalist heroine. Jones may

White Oleander features another Oprah’s Book Club heroine, the kind who earns nobility and respect through contrived suffering. In this adaptation of Janet Fitch’s novel, a 15-year-old girl (Alison Lohman) is shuttled among a series of foster homes where she survives shootings, beatings and suicides, among other traumas. What doesn’t kill you may make you

City by the Sea does with artful subtlety what the similarly themed Road to Perdition did with artsy pretension: Both movies explore the way legacies of violence are passed down from fathers to sons. Robert DeNiro plays a New York City detective who discovers the prime suspect in his latest murder investigation is his estranged,

A movie that’s less about drama than the possibility of drama, Distant is one of those imports built on silent passages and prevailing ambiguity. Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan matches such art-film cliches with his theme: the emotional distance between people that can be so difficult to bridge. Set in Istanbul, the movie follows a

The question of why anyone would bother to make another film version of Oliver Twist is not answered by director Roman Polanski. This works just fine as one of those tony, well-mounted adaptations destined to be shown in high school English classes, yet whatever the reason for tackling the picture (some have pointed to the

The Pianist surprises us with history. We know going in that everything portrayed here actually happened during the German occupation of Poland, but the movie’s litany of horrors still manages to catch us unawares. Based on the memoirs of Jewish pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman (a muted, mesmerizing Adrien Brody), the movie traces one man’s evasion of

Alexander Sokurov’s Russian Ark revisits 300 years of Russian history by wandering through St. Petersburg’s endless State Hermitage Museum in a single take. The camera flits among centuries as easily as it moves from room to room. It’s best not to try to apply logic to the movie and instead wonder at its bravura technical