As a “respectable” picture from bullets-and-babes producer Jerry Bruckheimer (Con Air, Coyote Ugly), this fact-based story about the 1971 integration of a high school football team calculatedly hits all the right notes for a socially conscious drama, but it also contains a strong performance by Denzel Washington and a few moments of feel-good truth. All

A simple fairy tale about tolerance unfolds when the newcomer to a 1959 French village (Juliette Binoche) scandalizes the locals by selling chocolates during Lent. This is the kind of nice, cuddly movie you feel like petting – and Academy members felt like nominating for multiple awards – but it’s not much more than that.

Overcoming an icky concept and title – Goldie Hawn and Susan Sarandon star as former rock groupies who reunite decades later – The Banger Sisters uses genuine humor to explore the ways we deal with our former selves. Both Hawn, as the barmaid still living in the past, and Sarandon, as the uptight suburban mom

Don’t expect to find out what drove the late anarchic comic Andy Kaufman in this biography piece, but thanks to Jim Carrey’s outrageous performance, you can relive the hilarious and baffling experience of watching Kaufman do his stuff. If only more of today’s entertainers were as risky as Kaufman – and Carrey.

From idiosyncratic filmmaking brothers Michael and Mark Polish, Northfork takes place in a small town in 1955 Middle America that is being evacuated to make way for a new dam. From there, the movie darts off in directions that are at turns mythical, Biblical and downright bizarre, all captured in striking black-and-white imagery. This is

No one quite does manipulative pap like director Garry Marshall (The Princess Diaries), and he pours it on again with Raising Helen. The movie concerns a modeling-agency assistant (Kate Hudson) who inherits three young kids when her sister and brother-in-law are killed in a car accident. Marshall saws at your heartstrings early on, then immediately

This movie biography of American music icon Ray Charles is reverential – with a spitting-image performance by Jamie Foxx – yet you’ll find more heartache, passion and pure emotion in the two-and-a-half minutes of What Would I Do Without You than in this picture’s more than two hours. Ray is a tribute movie, really, something

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,

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