Writer-director Cameron Crowe (Say Anything, Jerry Maguire) celebrates writing, rock and the art of growing up with his usual optimistic passion. Based on Crowe’s own experiences as a 16-year-old writer for Rolling Stone, the movie follows a teen-age rock journalist on tour with the fictional band Stillwater in the early ’70s. Patrick Fugit is a

Contrived as a drama and hokey as a comedy, Almost Salinas features Frasier star John Mahoney as the crotchety owner of a diner in a small California town near the site of James Dean’s fatal car crash. When a movie crew for a biopic on Dean descend on this little corner of the world, a

A jaunty spy movie based on the book by John Le Carre. Pierce Brosnan devilishly tweaks his James Bond image as a disgraced British spy who’s ordered to twiddle his thumbs in Panama, where he runs into an expatriate tailor (Geoffrey Rush) who may be more than he seems. There’s as much winking as acting

The Alamo trots out familiar names and thinks their mere history-book credentials will entertain us. Sam Houston (Dennis Quaid), Davy Crockett (Billy Bob Thornton) and Jim Bowie (Jason Patric) all show up on cue, but they – and the movie – are lifeless. The picture parades them around like politicians on a float whose significance

The insistently shocking Thirteen, about a junior-high kid’s (Evan Rachel Wood) self-destructive bout with adolescence, argues that today’s culture of flirtatious consumerism has made trashy 20-somethings out of our preteens. But what begins as an observant piece of social commentary soon becomes a hysterical exploitation flick, in which every sweet little girl you know is

Director James Ivory, working for the last time with his late producing partner Ismail Merchant, has a stately style that has served him so well because he usually employs it in stately stories (Howards End). But this calls for something different. Ralph Fiennes stars as a blind diplomat in 1936 Shanghai who opens a nightclub