I have to believe that Hustle & Flow, which was picked up by Paramount Classics at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival, was subjected to some heavy meddling on the way to mainstream theaters. I can’t remember another movie that started out so confidently, so utterly sure of its own swagger, and then limped so erratically

A stunning, stylistic depiction of addiction in which a son (Jared Leto) and his girlfriend (Jennifer Connelly) succumb to heroin and cocaine while his mother (a staggering Ellyn Burstyn) gets hooked on diet pills in a desperate attempt to lose weight. Writer-director Darren Aronofsky (Pi) has developed a cinematic shorthand of quick edits and frantic

It took me awhile to get past writer-director Noah Baumbach’s Wes Anderson affectations (Baumbach worked with Anderson on the script for The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou), but beneath them is a layer of hurt that feels authentic. Like Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums, this droll drama follows a peculiar, intellectual New York family (headed by

Movie formulas are almost always regrettable, but they are especially so when the subject being formulized is reduced in the process. That’s what happens with Walk the Line, which squeezes the life of Johnny Cash (Joaquin Phoenix) into the convenient, Oscar-friendly Ray format. When it isn’t ignoring hugely relevant portions of Cash’s life – namely

Scorsese’s fourth feature and his modern tribute, in a sense, to the classic Hollywood women’s picture. Scorsese has always been a film lover first and a filmmaker second, and so it’s appropriate that Alice opens with a striking visual homage to the likes of Gone with the Wind. Florid titles, elegant camerawork and a Technicolor

Blue Car has a firm grip on its lead character – a troubled high-school English student, played with spot-on sullenness by Agnes Bruckner – but it isn’t quite sure how to handle the rest of its players. The movie is an ensemble piece when its true calling is to be a character study. This is

An astonishing act of cinema and anthropology, Atanarjuat dramatizes an ancient legend of the Inuit people of the Canadian Arctic. The story traces the life of a hunter (Natar Ungalaaq) whose devotion to the community contrasts with the greed of the tribal leader’s son. As their lifelong feud illuminates the repercussions of breaking a society’s

Director Paul Schrader and star Greg Kinnear turn what could have been a big-screen True Hollywood Story – in this case the life of Hogan’s Heroes star and sex addict Bob Crane – into a fascinating portrait of a tortured personality. The groping on display has the sad desperation of a junkie shooting up in