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

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