Dogville (2003)

Drama Rated R

Danish director Lars von Trier (Breaking the Waves, Dancer in the Dark) has always provoked, but usually he does so through art. Dogville is agitprop. A failed, formalist experiment involving a single soundstage and chalk marks to denote buildings, the movie follows a moll (Nicole Kidman) on the run in Depression-era America who seeks solace

Notes on a Scandal (2006)

Drama Rated R

In Notes, Judi Dench pulls a fast one on both the other characters in the movie and the audience, and it’s a delight to be deceived. Dench plays Barbara, a hard-knock schoolteacher who discovers that a friend and fellow teacher (Cate Blanchett) is having an affair. She swoops in to correct the situation as responsibly

Sweet Sixteen (2002)

Drama Rated NR

British director Ken Loach (Riff-Raff) offers another gritty slice of underclass life with this story of a Scottish teenager caught between his jailed mom and her drug-dealing boyfriend. Martin Compston makes the movie with his fearless lead performance as a no-good kid who is doing his best not to do worse. The movie’s predictability –

Pursuit of Happyness, The (2006)

Drama Rated PG-13

This surprisingly genuine drama reminds us that homelessness can be a frighteningly simple – even mundane – process. Take underemployment, mix it with overdue rent and taxes and add a dash of plain old bad luck, and suddenly you’re fighting for a place in line at a shelter. That’s the predicament faced by Chris Gardner

Secondhand Lions (2003)

Drama Rated PG

The distinguished cast of Secondhand Lions – Haley Joel Osment, Robert Duvall and Michael Caine – do their best with a script that strains toward quirkiness and sentimentality, and their best is just good enough. The story of a shy 14-year-old who spends the summer with his eccentric uncles, the film has a lot of

Good German, The (2006)

Drama Rated R

An impeccable evocation of an earlier era, but not a freestanding film. The Good German, Steven Soderbergh’s meticulous melding of Casablanca and postwar film noirs, is awash in delectable period detail, from the shadowy black-and-white cinematography (also handled by Soderbergh) to the swooshing font used for the title to Thomas Newman’s music, which recalls the

Matchstick Men (2003)

Drama Rated PG-13

A piffle graced by a cast it doesn’t really deserve. Starring Nicolas Cage as an obsessive-compulsive con man who tracks down his estranged teen daughter (Alison Lohman), the movie’s most endearing aspect is that it is one of those instances in which Cage leaves behind the action idiocy of Con Air and The Rock for

Children of Men (2006)

Drama Rated R

“Now this is a nativity story.”

Rocky Balboa (2006)

Drama Rated PG

Sylvester Stallone should have never made another movie after this. I don’t mean that as an indictment of the sixth installment in Stallone’s ongoing exercise in can-do Americana. Rather, I mean that Rocky Balboa encapsulates the entire Stallone phenomenon in one film. His dumbbell appeal, his considerable limitations – everything is here, as well as

Proposition, The (2006)

Drama Rated R

Full of Biblical bleakness, The Proposition depicts 1880s Australia as an infernal landscape. As the captain (Ray Winstone) charged with maintaining a semblance of law and order says, “What fresh hell is this?” Winstone tries to reign in a band of ravaging brothers by capturing one of them (Guy Pearce) and convincing him to bring