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

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