Take a self-indulgent English professor (Michael Douglas), a morose but gifted writing student (Tobey Maguire) and a dead dog stuffed in a car trunk, and what do you get? A surprisingly heartfelt and funny comedy that has just enough quirkiness for its own good. From director Curtis Hanson, making a modest follow-up to L.A. Confidential.

Who better than director Oliver Stone to capture the macho posturing, licensed violence and gaudy excess of professional football? He does that with his usual provocative flair in Any Given Sunday, starring Al Pacino, Cameron Diaz and Jamie Foxx, and the result is a fascinating sports tragedy about the complications (fame, greed, etc.) that have

An astonishingly assured work from first-time feature director Bennett Miller, Capote explores the cost that Truman Capote paid for writing his 1966 nonfiction book In Cold Blood, which chronicled the real-life drama surrounding the murders of a Kansas family. As Capote (Philip Seymour Hoffman, who minced his way to a Best Actor Oscar) forms a

A lark for Steven Spielberg, this is based on the true story of Frank W. Abagnale (Leonardo DiCaprio), who spent most of the 1960s posing as an airline pilot, an attorney, a pediatrician and a college professor, all while he was between the ages of 16 and 21. It could have been a revealing portrait

The sweeping romantic drama that 2001’s Pearl Harbor wanted to be, From Here to Eternity follows the tumultuous lives of three Army men stationed in Honolulu during the days leading up to Dec. 7, 1941. A coiled, volatile Montgomery Clift stars as Robert Prewitt, a young private who loves the Army but can’t quite adjust

Despite its quirky, comic charm, The Graduate is, in effect, a tragedy. It’s the story of a man who experiences the disillusionment of adulthood far sooner than he should have to. The youth in question is Benjamin Braddock, indelibly played by a stammering, jittery, 29-year-old Dustin Hoffman. Director Mike Nichols tells us all we need