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),

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