A media critique along the lines of Network, also directed by Sidney Lumet, Dog Day Afternoon dramatizes an actual, botched bank robbery in New York City that turned into a television circus. For the hostages, for the robbers, for the cops and crowd gathered outside, it all becomes a big show, even though lives hang

A drug-addled drug movie about two bikers (Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper) who make their way across America – Hopper also directed – Easy Rider is, inevitably, a bit of a mess, with a loopy graveyard climax that feels like one of the first – and worst – music videos. Yet in its own laconic

Foul-mouthed writer-director Kevin Smith (Dogma) aims for the smart sentimentality of something like About a Boy with this unfairly dismissed byproduct of the Bennifer saga (Jennifer Lopez appears only briefly). Surprisingly, Smith hits that elusive mark more often than he misses. Ben Affleck plays a single dad struggling to balance his career as a high-profile

I suppose if I created a flowchart of characters and devoted a few solid hours to it, I could make some sense out of the oil drama Syriana. Unfortunately, I haven’t had the urge to do any political-science homework since college (and even then the urge was faint). As another 2005 Message Movie featuring George

Steven Spielberg’s penchant for sentimentality and narrative convention hold back The Terminal, yet the movie is far too much a flight of fancy to be kept completely grounded. Heaving a bulky accent but otherwise light on his feet, Tom Hanks plays an Eastern European traveler stranded in an American airport, resulting in a Kafkaesque piece

From its subtle early images – the sight of a little boy’s bicycle blowing over in the wind nicely foreshadows the upheaval of one family’s life – to its lovely and ambiguous final shot, this is a provocative sex thriller whose best moments are the least explicit ones. When a happy-enough housewife (Diane Lane) embarks

Often cited by critics and historians as one of the cinema’s all-time greats, Au Hasard Balthazar takes a simple premise reminiscent of Black Beauty and expands on it with devotion and reverence. The movie follows the life of a donkey named Balthazar who is buffeted from one owner to the next, encountering much hardship, a

Terrence Malick had a fluid naturalism in his debut feature, a loose dramatization of the Charles Starkweather-Caril Anne Fugate killing spree of the late 1950s. This is largely another of Malick’s impressionistic tales of paradise lost, but here the dreamy approach feels fresh and exciting. As it follows Starkweather/Fugate stand-ins Kit (Martin Sheen) and Holly