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 –

Hours, The (2002)

Drama Rated PG-13

A carefully constructed consideration of the themes at play in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, The Hours features three great actresses doing great work: Oscar-winner Nicole Kidman, portraying Woolf as she battles mental illness while writing Dalloway; Julianne Moore, as a brittle mother suffocating beneath the domestic responsibilities of the 1950s; and Meryl Streep, playing a

Jakob the Liar (1999)

Drama Rated PG-13

Casually bashed as another one of Robin Williams’ pandering pieces of sentimental pap (Patch Adams, Bicentennial Man), this story of a recent widower in Nazi-occupied Poland is actually understated and respectful; the humor here is mostly bitter and rarely sweet. As the widower, who pretends he has a radio to bring hope to his fellow

Queen, The (2006)

Drama Rated PG-13

The Queen speculates on the behind-the-scenes turmoil that engulfed England’s royal family in the days following Princess Diana’s death. Helen Mirren anchors the picture as Queen Elizabeth II, and she’s able to simultaneously evoke disgust and sympathy at once. Even as she coldly dismisses the significance of Diana’s death, especially to her grandsons, Elizabeth exhibits