Ride With the Devil (1999)

Drama Rated R

Ang Lee’s unfairly maligned Civil War drama, with Tobey Maguire and Skeet Ulrich as Southern bushwhackers defending their homeland from Northern attackers. Sure, it’s slow, but the landscapes often are as beautiful as those of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and the conflicting allegiances – ironically, one of the heroes’ riding partners is a former slave,

Road to Perdition (2002)

Drama Rated R

An accomplished, if distant, period drama, as well as director Sam Mendes’ follow-up to American Beauty. With its hushed performances, stately visuals and lush production design, this tale of a Prohibition-era hit man (Tom Hanks) struggling to connect with his 12-year-old son (Tyler Hoechlin) puts its hands on its hips and dares you to call

The Prestige (2006)

Drama Rated PG-13

“…that rare magic trick that still holds its power even after you’ve learned all of its secrets.”

Little Children (2006)

Drama Rated R

Little Children never reconciles its two main plot strands, no matter how much you’re rooting for it to do just that. The movie takes place in leafy, tot-strewn suburbia, where an affair between a frustrated young mother (Kate Winslet) and an aimless stay-at-home dad (Patrick Wilson) is set against the return of a convicted sex

Flags of Our Fathers (2006)

Drama Rated R

Most movies, especially war movies, mythologize their subjects. Flags of Our Fathers does the opposite. In telling the story behind the famous World War II photo of Americans planting a flag on the island of Iwo Jima, director Clint Eastwood means to deconstruct the symbolic power of the image itself. At times, it’s a challenge

Marie Antoinette (2006)

Drama Rated PG-13

I wouldn’t say all the fuss over Sofia Coppola’s anachronistic history project was much ado about nothing, but it was certainly much ado about nothingness. Coppola depicts Antoinette (Kirsten Dunst) as less monarch than entitled celebrity, reveling in a life of endless shoes, luscious desserts and blasts of 1980s modern rock. Beyond this, Marie doesn’t

Swept Away (2002)

Drama Rated R

Awful, yet awfully fascinating. Writer-director Guy Ritchie (Snatch) leads his wife Madonna through a remake of the 1975 Italian comedy, which followed a society woman stranded on an island with a working-class sailor who slaps her into submission. In place of the original’s cruelty, Ritchie adds a sweeping sense of romanticism and bizarre moments in

Officer and a Gentleman, An (1982)

Drama Rated R

An Officer and a Gentleman didn’t invent the military-romance cliches that have haunted us ever since 1982 – 2006 alone gave us doppelgangers such as Annapolis and The Guardian, and of course there was Top Gun – but the movie was such an overwhelming, popular favorite that it essentially carved the cliches into stone. Richard

Infamous (2006)

Drama Rated R

This was a doomed project even before 2005’s Capote beat it to theaters, mainly because this second portrait of Truman Capote has no consistent creative vision. Part of the movie wants to be a comedy of manners, with Toby Jones as a far more flamboyant Capote than the one Philip Seymour Hoffman gave us. Another

Volver (2006)

Drama Rated R

Penelope Cruz gives a complicated, peerless performance in Pedro Almodovar’s Volver – and she looks like a classic screen goddess doing it. Cruz plays Raimunda, a working-class wife and mother in Madrid who gets caught up in a murder plot. I can’t say more – the movie operates on a series of startling revelations –