Inspirational sports movies aren’t known for their subtlety, but Goal! embraces its feel-good cliches with an enthusiasm that’s embarrassing. Kuno Becker plays a Mexican soccer sensation trying to make it on the pro level in England, and it’s hard to decide what is more cliched during his obvious journey to stardom, the ups (yes, there

Take away director Martin Scorsese’s name, and what do you have with this portrait of industrialist/pilot/filmmaker/weirdo Howard Hughes (Leonardo DiCaprio)? Yet another movie biography angling for end-of-year honors, albeit one a bit more sensitively handled and artfully done. The picture certainly has its rewards, including DiCaprio’s laser-like focus, but it pins Scorsese in the past.

Playing fast and loose with the facts behind the making of 1922’s Nosferatu – German director F.W. Murnau’s silent adaptation of Dracula – Shadow of the Vampire posits that the movie’s otherworldly star, Max Schreck, was a bloodsucker in real life. Aided by a bravura title performance from Willem Dafoe – his Schreck is a

Another provocative picture from filmmaker Andrew Niccol (writer-director of Gattaca and writer of The Truman Show), Simone claims it doesn’t take much to be a star. Sometimes, as happens here when a washed-up movie director (Al Pacino) creates a computer-generated actress, you don’t even have to exist. Simone exposes the hollowness of celebrity culture with

The feature directorial debut of Tommy Lee Jones actually stands out more as another fractured tale from screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga (21 Grams). Arriaga’s multilayered stories weave about in unexpected directions, and the question here is whether or not Jones can lasso them in. Jones also stars as an aging cowboy whose friend – the illegal

Part documentary, part autobiography and part dramatization, all based on Harvey Pekar’s cult comic-book series, American Splendor cleverly manages to keep the Cleveland crank’s vision intact. For both Pekar and the movie, everyday life is a form of routine performance art, to be endured as much as enjoyed.

A limited if striking exercise from writer-director Todd Haynes, who employs the heightened style of the 1950s suburban melodramas of director Douglas Sirk. Julianne Moore plays a 1957 housewife who enters into a taboo friendship with her black gardener (Dennis Haysbert) just as her marriage is falling apart. The plot – along with the swooning

This striking, black-and-white drama believes in something perhaps only the child of a former television news anchor – which co-writer/director George Clooney is – could believe in: that TV news can save the nation. A brisk dramatization of broadcaster Edward R. Murrow’s on-air challenges to the anti-communist campaign of Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy, Clooney’s movie

Unlike A Beautiful Mind, this biographical account of a great thinker’s battle with their own deteriorating intellect is aloof and uninvolving; disease remains at a distance. As lauded British novelist Iris Murdoch (Judi Dench) succumbs to Alzheimer’s, we’re mostly left with images of a doddering, depressed woman – pitiful scenes with no real purpose other