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

Best Picture honors were awarded to Clint Eastwood’s sports drama, about an aging trainer (Eastwood) and an aspiring female boxer (Hilary Swank), but the movie is mostly a tribute to his work ethic. “If I’m too old for this, then I got nothing,” Swank’s fighter says early in her training. Interesting if pedestrian efforts such

This adaptation of Graham Greene’s novel about a British journalist in 1952 Vietnam can’t quite shake its source material. Chunks of the book are borrowed for voice-over narration, mostly out of narrative necessity rather than as part of some grand thematic plan. On the plus side are strong turns by the Oscar-nominated Michael Caine as

In its rush to enshrine its scientist subject (Liam Neeson), Kinsey essentially becomes a piece of science itself: clinical, methodical, emotionally detached. The movies, however, involve other things – feelings, for one – and the main failing of writer-director Bill Condon’s film is that it’s afraid to fully consider what effect the man’s academic approach

Steven Spielberg seems embarrassed by his talent in this painstakingly restrained dramatization of the Israeli revenge mission that followed the 1972 massacre of 11 Israeli Olympians. Munich has a few arresting elements, including the newsreel cinematography of Janusz Kaminski and an appropriately twitchy lead performance from Eric Bana (Troy), playing an Israeli agent who is

You get the feeling the cast and crew – including writer-director Steven Soderbergh and George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Julia Roberts, Matt Damon, Catherine Zeta-Jones and more – skipped filming a sequel to the 2001 heist hit and decided to go right ahead to the wrap party. Nobody making a high-stakes major-studio release should be having

Director Michael Mann (The Insider) takes a revolutionary approach to the biography genre, presenting Muhammad Ali’s boxing career as a series of subjective memories rather than a step-by-step chronological document. If Ali’s life flashed before his eyes, it might look something like this. Will Smith is dead-on as Ali and the unconventional approach elevates what

There sure are some beautiful vistas in this romantic Western, but they only allow you to see the movie’s laborious cliches more clearly. Clumsily adapted by director Billy Bob Thornton from Cormac McCarthy’s best-selling novel, the movie follows a young Texan (Matt Damon) who falls for the daughter (Penelope Cruz) of a wealthy rancher in

For anyone who’s ever been bruised by romance, All the Real Girls will have the bittersweet flavor of a forgotten crush, a messy breakup, a lovers’ spat. Writer-director David Gordon Green’s beautiful, lyrical film – which traces the doomed affair between a 20-something lady’s man (Paul Schneider) and a younger girl (a riveting Zooey Deschanel),