Brutal and honest, The Patriot certainly is a rousing celebration of American independence, but the movie is more valuable as a rumination on vengeance and violence. When Mel Gibson’s pacifist farmer forms a militia against the British to avenge an attack on his family, far more than a Rambo revenge fantasy follows. Instead, The Patriot

Joan Allen acts up a storm as Terry, an abandoned wife and mother of four daughters, but thankfully it is of the authentic, rather than Oscar-baiting, variety. Kevin Costner also makes a welcome appearance as a retired baseball player who lives in the neighborhood and becomes Terry’s drinking buddy. The movie tiptoes between tragedy and

The Woodsman humanizes an inhuman problem – that of pedophilia – thanks mainly to a coiled performance by Kevin Bacon. As a convicted child molester just released from prison, Bacon taps into his character’s sickness and self-hatred with such intensity that he elicits something you would think impossible: sympathy.

It’s appropriate that Stick It even has a title that sneers, for watching the movie is like spending an hour supervising detention. Missy Peregrym plays a former gymnastics star who has rebelled into the tomboy world of bike tricks. After her latest stunt, a judge orders her to attend a strict gymnastics academy. The gimmick

There’s a healthy respect for the craft of writing in this story of a reclusive author (Sean Connery) who mentors an underprivileged but talented teen-ager (Rob Brown) in the Bronx, but things turn arch and silly fast. Director Gus Van Sant gives in to all of the treacly contrivances he avoided in the similarly themed

A piercing, if not very subtle, adaptation of Robert Penn Warren’s Pulitzer Prize-winning political novel about the rise and eventual corruption of a man of the people. Broderick Crawford is a blowzy, booming force as Willie Stark, a man who means well at the start of his political career and still believes he means well