As Rocky on four legs, Seabiscuit works just fine – it’s a stately, based-on-fact drama about the unlikely champion racehorse of the 1930s and the jockey (Tobey Maguire), trainer (Chris Cooper) and owner (Jeff Bridges) who made him. Writer-director Gary Ross stretches his underdog theme a bit too far by envisioning the horse as an

A tragicomic dissection of male, middle-aged angst, this centers on a Chicago meteorologist (Nicolas Cage) who is a well-meaning but consistently disappointing divorced father of two. As it chronicles his foibles, you realize few movies plant us so squarely inside a character’s head. Partly this is due to Cage’s sad-clown performance and part of it

In this well-intentioned attempt to honor American soldiers who fought in Vietnam, writer-director Randall Wallace and star Mel Gibson have created a Saving Private Ryan wannabe, from the melodramatic air of reverence to the trendy dollops of gore. Do Vietnam veterans who fought bravely and honorably deserve our respect? Certainly. But lazily anointing them as

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