Another showy but unflattering role for Sean Penn, who plays Samuel Bicke, based on the man who tried to hijack a plane in 1974 in an ill-fated attempt to crash it into the White House. Perhaps the Achilles heel of Bicke – the man’s actual name was spelled Byck – was his belief that it

This may be a greater labor of love for writer-director-star Robert Duvall than his other auteurist effort, 1997’s The Apostle, though it’s the far lesser film. A valentine to the dance form the actor adores, Assassination Tango nevertheless suffers from infatuation. Duvall’s clearly taken with the tango, but that doesn’t mean we’ll be taken with

Spanish director Pedro Almodovar’s drama may sound like a stunt – put Mexican heartthrob Gael Garcia Bernal in a dress – but anyone familiar with the compassion Almodovar brings to even his most outrageous endeavors knows to expect more from him than that. This particular endeavor involves a movie within the movie that a director

One of those dense, complex literary adaptations that makes you want to read the novel on which it’s based. Unfortunately, I wanted to do that about halfway through the movie. As it follows 11-year-old Eliza Naumann (Flora Cross) through an astonishing succession of spelling bee triumphs, Bee Season tackles issues of both earthly and eternal

In the blistering desert of Brazil, two rural families engage in a generations-old land dispute that breeds murder and – in the hands of director Walter Salles – overwrought symbolism. There’s some striking imagery here, from a blood-stained shirt flapping on a clothesline to the endless dried brambles that dominate the landscape. But as the

This ambitious biographical drama is so intent on defining persecuted Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas by his homosexuality that we never quite grasp a sense of his artistic accomplishments. Javier Bardem, nominated for a Best Actor Oscar for his portrayal of Arenas, strains valiantly to fill in the gaps, but it still feels like an incomplete

Big Momma’s House meets Misery meets Enough. Who would want to combine a Martin Lawrence cross-dressing comedy, a Stephen King story about a tortured crippled man and a Jennifer Lopez melodrama about domestic abuse? Tyler Perry, who adapted the movie from his own stage play and stars as a sassy grandmother. His slapstick painfully grates

As another writing-directing effort from Hollywood sensitive male Cameron Crowe (Jerry Maguire), this carried the burden of high expectations. I watched it holding my breath, waiting for the arrival of that singular punch to the gut that all of Crowe’s movies deliver. It never comes. Elizabethtown flounders, flopping about in search of a consistent theme,