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

It’s hard to describe The Thin Red Line, the return of Terrence Malick to directing after a 20-year absence, as anything but exquisitely beautiful, despite the fact that it largely traces the awful violence experienced and perpetuated by a band of American soldiers on the Pacific island of Guadalcanal during World War II. This is

The career-capping personal epic of hard-boiled director Samuel Fuller (Shock Corridor). From his pitiless crime dramas of the 1950s and ’60s on, Fuller operated a camera that never blinked, never prettied, never judged. He brings that same circumspect tone to this World War II picture, even though much of it is drawn from his own

Lars von Trier’s international breakthrough mixes – maybe even equates – religion and sex, yet the movie is far less exploitative than it sounds. When a mentally unstable young woman (a vulnerable yet brave Emily Watson) breaks away from her rigid Christian community to marry a strapping oil rigger (Stellan Skarsgard), she finds a life

Bullitt earned its reputation for Steve McQueen’s lengthy car chase through the hills of San Francisco, and the sequence does have a gritty, low-tech authenticity. Yet there’s more to the movie than squealing wheels. A crime picture embroiled in the detail work of law enforcement, the film stars McQueen as the definitive workaholic cop. His

It might look like a musical and talk like a musical, but stars Jodie Foster and Chow Yun-Fat don’t sing at all in this latest version of the story that inspired Rodgers and Hammerstein’s The King and I. What you also won’t find is a lot of intellectual depth, as director Andy Tennant (Ever After)

Like Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York, this Brazilian film chronicles a community that succumbs to chaos – specifically the Rio de Janeiro slum of the title. Unlike Gangs, however, City of God juggles with a fleet sense of flair the very things that bogged Scorsese’s opus down: a huge cast of characters, an expansive

The absurdities of Enough – in which Jennifer Lopez plays a browbeaten wife who becomes a trained fighter in hopes of killing her abusive husband – are endless, but what’s most galling about the film is the way it patronizes the issue at hand. Enough wants to be both a cathartic, cinematic punch and a