We popcorn-chomping hitchhikers never know who will pick us up on the roadside. In Flirting With Disaster, it was a neurotic Manhattan adoptee on a nationwide search for his biological parents. The desert-parched heroines of Thelma & Louise brought us along as they raised hell en route to their doom…

The Jerry Lewis chromosome is running amok again inside Jim Carrey, and if you don’t feel like getting clubbed half to death with a slapstick, stay away from Fun With Dick and Jane. On the other hand, if Carrey’s tireless antics–slithering onto nightclub tables, speaking in tongues and all manner…

It’s not hard to predict how Ang Lee’s controversial Brokeback Mountain will play in John Wayne country. This romantic tragedy about a pair of lean, wind-burned cowpokes who secretly live to poke each other flies in the face of everything that most people in Casper or Riverton or Laramie think…

Most movies intend to entertain or inform us, or maybe take our minds momentarily off personal problems–that bullet-riddled body in the trunk, say, or Aunt Edna’s arrest for shoplifting doughnuts. Presumably, no picture really means to make an airtight case against children. But after sitting through the witless, terminally irritating…

Moviegoers with a taste for nasty villains will get all they can handle from the heavy in Swedish director Mikael Håfstrom’s Derailed. Philippe LaRoche–played with obvious relish by a craggy-faced Vincent Cassel–is not the kind of effete Frenchman you find reading poetry in the corner bistro while he sips a…

Devotees of Asian cinema–especially those with a thirst for blood–will probably delight in the unofficial sequel to 2002’s horror sampler Three. Like its predecessor, Three . . . Extremes is a trilogy of short films that root around in the dark regions of the psyche and conclude that human behavior…

It’s been 85 years since Douglas Fairbanks slashed his way into the top tax bracket as the masked hero Zorro, and Hollywood still can find no reason to shut down the franchise. Technically speaking, The Legend of Zorro, starring Antonio Banderas as the guy with the sword and Catherine Zeta-Jones…

When we first see the protagonist of North Country, a working-class heroine portrayed by a deglamorized Charlize Theron, she’s sporting a black eye and a slight limp, the results of an encounter with her abusive husband. We soon learn that Josey Aimes is only now beginning to take her lumps…

Anyone vaguely familiar with the rules of golf knows that you may not improve your lie, ground your club in a sand trap, or–most grievous of all–subtract strokes from your score. This last one apparently never occurred to the makers of a new movie with the grandiose title The Greatest…

By conservative estimate, Tim Burton stands to rake in half a billion dollars at the box office this year, thanks to a childlike chocolate maker in mauve rubber gloves and, now, to a lively dead girl with marriage on her mind and the timid schlub who falls under her spell…

The contentedly independent filmmaker Jim Jarmusch has brought his restless energy to a series of surreal road movies that move nicely along on the strength of rare characters, quirky humor and a willing embrace of chance adventure. These quest stories for hipsters have transported Jarmusch’s fiercely loyal audience from New…

If the Navy is looking for splashy recruiting tools, it could do worse than Stealth, a zillion-dollar action movie stuffed with futuristic jet fighters, glamorous carrier pilots and an overload of explosive, mostly digital derring-do. Here is Top Gun revised and updated, complete with a new array of enemies–swarthy Middle…

Roald Dahl’s inner child was evidently a contrary lad–precocious, dark-minded, contemptuous of adult supervision and fueled by a sense of justice that often proceeded via cruel whim. In Dahl’s twisty children’s stories, villains throw kids out of windows, beautiful women turn out to be hideous witches in disguise and parents…

The British indie filmmaker Sally Potter, a former dancer, lyricist and performance artist, clearly has a taste for adventure. In 1992 that led her to Orlando, a screen adaptation of the experimental Virginia Woolf novel about an Elizabethan nobleman who hangs around for 400 years, eventually morphing into a hip…

The consequences of marital discord in Mr. & Mrs. Smith go way beyond sleeping on the couch or maintaining icy silence at the breakfast table. Thanks to a cartoonish premise by British screenwriter Simon Kinberg–and the dictates of the summer-movie marketplace–the battling Smiths of the title go at each other…

Jane Fonda comes from a good Hollywood family and used to be a pretty fair actress herself. Klute, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? and Coming Home were three of the better films of their time. So, after getting a look at herself in her first movie in 15 years, La…

Whatever you do, don’t accuse Ridley Scott of turning his back on a fight. Doesn’t matter if it’s slimy-fanged space aliens attacking Sigourney Weaver, Roman slaves in tough against hungry lions down at the Coliseum or American GIs going at it with Somali insurgents. Sir Ridley is always happy to…

Alex Gibney’s Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room is a thoroughly professional, frequently spectacular piece of muckraking. But any American who hopes to watch this portrait of unfettered corporate greed, cynical power-lust and outrageous deception without going postal about an hour into the thing would do well to bring…

Matthew Parkhill’s Dot the I is the kind of tricked-up mental exercise that may intrigue the most impressionable film school students and a philosophy major here and there. But anyone who’s gotten through sophomore year without declaring him the next great thinker of the Western Hemisphere is more likely to…

If nothing else, give Dana Brown credit for enthusiasm. A documentary filmmaker in name only, he is really the camera- and microphone-equipped president of several booster clubs–among them what might be called the International Society of Beach Bums and, thanks to his latest exercise in hero worship, the Dune Buggy…

Despite the sunshine of the Stalin years and the carefree frolic of the oligarchs, the words “Russia” and “romantic comedy” don’t exactly come skipping off the tongue in perfect harmony. But if we can believe co-directors Olga Stolpovskaya and Dmitry Troitsky, a welcome spirit of playfulness–or the brave effort to…

The chilling oddity of Oliver Hirschbiegel’s Downfall is not limited to the fact that it’s the first mainstream German film to grapple with Adolf Hitler–six decades after his death. Set, for the most part, in the underground Berlin bunker where the Nazi dictator spent his last days, this is a…