Back in her early teens, Reese Witherspoon proved herself a terrific actress in her big-screen debut, Man in the Moon in 1991. Since then, she’s done first-rate work in critical hits like Pleasantville, cult faves like Freeway and Election and underrated gems like Best Laid Plans. So how is it…

Kiss of the Dragon–the latest vehicle for martial arts star Jet Li, a mainland Chinese talent who became a superstar in Hong Kong and has since succumbed to the blandishments of Hollywood–has a little of the best (and a lot of the worst) of Hong Kong films, and a lot…

Sexy Beast, the debut feature from British director Jonathan Glazer, is a riveting, scary and often funny foray into a traditional American genre: the gangster film. Like the western, the gangster film has always been predominantly American turf, but–unlike with the western–every decade or so the Brits come up with…

The current release of French director Nicole Garcia’s Place Vendôme–which was nominated for 11 César Awards when it debuted in France two years ago–is yet another sign that the drop-off in French imports that has plagued U.S. screens in recent years is reversing: This is roughly the 15th French film…

The first thing you must know about Eureka, the new film from Japanese director Shinji Aoyama, is that it runs three hours and 38 minutes. With no intermission. Having said that, let me add that despite its length, despite its deliberately measured pacing and avoidance of flashy effects, Eureka is,…

With luck, Yi Yi (A One and a Two), the seventh release from writer-director Edward Yang, one of Taiwan’s most respected filmmakers, will open a vein of interest in Taiwan’s cinema, but it will be an uphill struggle. While it’s a rich and rewarding film, its pace is more leisurely…

French director Patrice Leconte is a chameleonlike talent: Among his films to reach American screens are the psychological thriller Mr. Hire, the period satire Ridicule and the offbeat comic romance The Girl on the Bridge. But in truth, all of Leconte’s films are romances at heart, though they are often…

As its title suggests, Spy Kids is an action fantasy aimed primarily at the preteen/early-teen audience. For all its thrills–and it has plenty–it’s strictly a PG film…which is all the more surprising when you consider its source: Robert Rodriguez, master of bloody gunplay and monster films that sometimes even push…

Amid the plethora of films starring Freddie Prinze Jr., Mena Suvari, Chris Klein and Jason Biggs, it’s nice–in theory, at least–to see a contemporary romantic comedy like Someone Like You, where the characters, while hardly over the hill, are all over 30. In practice, however, “nice” is really about as…

Director John Herzfeld’s last feature, the droll and underrated 1996 2 Days in the Valley, was a more than adequate counterbalance to the catastrophe of his first feature, Two of a Kind, a 1983 John Travolta vehicle that, together with Moment by Moment, put its star on the fast track…

With In the Mood for Love, Wong Kar-wai solidifies his stature as the most subtle and most idiosyncratic of Hong Kong directors. In an industry best known for its accessible, crowd-pleasing comedies and action films, Wong has turned out a series of increasingly risky dramas that make little or no…

Im Kwon Taek has long been the best-known Korean director in America; in fact, it would be fair to say that he’s pretty much the only even vaguely known Korean director, and even then his renown is strictly among festivalgoers. The general distribution of his latest film, Chunhyang, should be…

Ridley Scott’s Hannibal, with a screenplay by David Mamet and Steven Zaillian, is being released exactly 10 years after Silence of the Lambs, the film that established Hannibal Lecter as an iconic villain in our culture, right up there with Nightmare on Elm Street’s Freddy Krueger, Friday the 13th’s Jason,…

There are few things more deadly in cinema than theater types taking stage material and simply transposing it to the big screen. But occasionally such adaptations are handled so deftly that they work. To stretch a point, one could mention My Dinner with Andre as a successful instance; and, I’m…

Thirteen Days is a suspenseful look at the American government in the grip of a crucial, minute-to-minute, real-life crisis that threatens to destroy the country. No, it is not–as the relatively brief time span referenced in the title makes clear–about the recent election struggles…or the 1998 impeachment…or the Watergate hearings,…

The year 1999 was too good to last, but did 2000 have to be such a big letdown? Did the best film year in at least a decade and a half have to be followed by one of the worst? This year, there are a good 20 films that would…

For slightly more than a decade, Chinese martial arts films have–directly and indirectly–gained a growing audience in America. Now the genre may find its greatest breakthrough coming from an unlikely source–director Ang Lee, best known for such comedy-dramas of social manners as Sense and Sensibility, The Wedding Banquet, and The…

Thirty-five years ago, at the height of Beatlemania–the phenomenon, not the stage show–some cynics pooh-poohed the notion that the unprecedented hysteria around the Four Lads from Liverpool would endure. (“What are you going to do when the bubble bursts?” a smug, apparently drunk Tallulah Bankhead sneered at John and Paul…

At first glance, the new Japanese import Non-Stop seems to be a crude knockoff of German director Tom Tykwer’s wonderful Run Lola Run, but Non-Stop was released in Japan (under the title Dangan Runner) in 1996, two years before Lola was shot. Could Tykwer have seen the film at a…

November may mean Thanksgiving to most of you, but in the film biz it means a rush of “serious” films trying to gouge an impression into the short memories of Oscar voters. This shouldn’t be a bad thing, but since the relationship between “Oscar” and “actually interesting filmmaking” is nearly…

The first thing to know about The Legend of Drunken Master is that there is no Legend of Drunken Master–not really. Miramax/ Dimension’s new Jackie Chan release is a repackaging of the star’s 1994 Drunken Master 2. This is not inherently a bad thing. Nearly all Jackie Chan buffs–count this…