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

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