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

Television actor Zach Braff (Scrubs) unveiled true filmmaking talent in this writing-directing-starring effort about a middling, heavily medicated actor (Braff) who returns to his native New Jersey for a funeral and learns that even a painful life is worth living. There’s a tinge of narcissim to get past, but the reward is Braff’s penchant for

What appears to be a female version of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest actually is a quieter, subtler and at times even more discerning look at mental illness. Winona Ryder stars as 17-year-old Susanna Kaysen, whose memoir about her real-life experiences in a psychiatric hospital during the late 1960s inspired the film, but this

Admirable, yet never registering as more than a stunt, writer-director Michael Almereyda’s adaptation sets Shakespeare’s tragedy – original language and all – amid the corporate culture of 2000 New York (here it’s the Denmark Corporation that’s corrupted). This modernity allows for some sly wit and nifty touches – Hamlet (Ethan Hawke) delivers the “to be

Don Cheadle plays Paul Rusesabagina, the hotel manager who risked his life to house more than 1,0000 refugees from both sides of the genocide that plagued Rwanda in the 1990s. The movie’s triumph – particularly in light of the hero-worshipping biopics we’re used to – is the way it traces Rusesabagina’s burgeoning courage with an