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

Camille, in which Greta Garbo plays a society woman on the prowl for a rich husband in 1847 Paris, features a parade of jewel-bedecked gowns, yet when director George Cukor cuts to a close-up of his star, everything else fades. In medium or long shot Garbo is your average actress – even, at certain angles,

This is a classic British spy yarn, equally rife with intrigue and tweed jackets. Dougray Scott stars as a World War II code-breaker whose brief, doomed affair with a sultry blond may have led to a massive security breach. When his former lover goes missing, he teams up with her neighbor (Kate Winslet) to discover

The battle lines are clearly drawn in this independent drama – brainy academics versus artistic free spirits – and writer-director Lisa Cholodenko has no intention of blurring them. Christian Bale plays a medical student who transfers with his fiancee (Kate Beckinsale) to Los Angeles, where their relationship is challenged by his bohemian mother (Frances McDormand).