The beautiful little conceit at the heart of Brad Anderson’s Happy Accidents is that audiences will sit still once more for the crackpot notion of time travel–and in a movie that’s not science fiction. To his credit, and with an implied bow to Back to the Future and its predecessors,…

Faced with yet another sports movie in which a group of lovably troubled kids triumphs over adversity, it’s easier to scoff and grumble than to feel even partially uplifted. So let’s do it; let’s scoff and grumble, at least for a moment. In Brian Robbins’ Hardball, a degenerate gambler who…

Woody Allen’s latest romp through Old New York combines (among other things) a skirt-chasing insurance investigator with the charm of a rodent, a wisecracking Vassar grad who takes no guff and a nightclub hypnotist in a sequined turban who doubles as a major jewel thief. The year is 1940. The…

The social lessons of Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, all of them suitable for framing in just about any dorm room, are these: War is bad. Love is good. The Italians love to sing, even when they’re supposed to be at war. The Greeks are freedom fighters. And whatever you do, don’t…

When last we spotted indie icons Vince Vaughn and Jon Favreau onscreen together, they were knocking back fruit-flavored martinis and chasing L.A. skirt in the inventive Gen-X hit Swingers. The goofy charm of that phenomenon now gives way, sad to report, to a labored fringes-of-the-mob comedy called Made, in which…

If there’s any justice in moviedom, this summer’s feel-good hit will be an unassuming Dutch comedy called Everybody’s Famous! Defying long odds, writer-director Dominique Deruddere has taken a couple of shopworn subjects–the public obsession with celebrity and the ineptitude of amateur criminals–and parlayed them into an original and inventive farce…

In the movies, dead husbands and dearly departed boyfriends have an irksome habit of revisiting the women who once loved them–usually at inconvenient moments. Consider Demi Moore in Ghost. Poor thing had to put up with the dramatically challenged shade of Patrick Swayze, who droned on and on about a…

The German filmmaker Tom Tykwer has a gift for fusing psychological complexity and crackling plot without forsaking the excitements of either. The success of Run Lola Run didn’t exactly turn Tykwer into a household name, but it earned him his props as a young lion of the art houses. Moviegoers…

The crimes Hollywood has committed against the major Russian novelists would themselves fill a pretty hefty tome. While reducing giants such as Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and Pasternak to lavish costuming and snappy dialogue over the years, the studio moguls also made some eccentric casting choices–for instance, cover boy George Hamilton as…

Irish. Sex. Farce. These are not three words you see snuggled up together very often. Given the ironclad no-no’s of the Catholic church, the preoccupations imposed by their political troubles for the last eight centuries or so and frequent commutes to the local pub, the Irish probably haven’t had much…

In David Maquiling’s quirky little first feature, Too Much Sleep, a rudderless 24-year-old who lives at home with his mother and works nights as a security guard must go on a quest. Rising lazily from his bed, he sets out into the tidy suburbs of New Jersey to track down…

The heroine of Andrucha Waddington’s Me, You, Them is a force of nature who holds men in her thrall and deftly reshapes them to suit life. Without knowing it, they fall prey to her charms, her spirit, her very scent. But she’s no Cleopatra dripping with jewels, no Lucrezia Borgia…

Van Gogh was a lunatic who cut off his ear. Picasso was a self-absorbed cur who abused women. Warhol turned out to be a weird, desperate loner, Basquiat a doomed junkie. Try as he might, shriveled little Toulouse-Lautrec failed miserably at romance. As for El Greco’s explosive affair with that…

With the canon of Jane Austen all but exhausted, literary filmmakers continue their assault on Edith Wharton, another sharply observant writer of yore with something timeless to say about the plight of women. Terence Davies’ The House of Mirth, from Wharton’s beautifully detailed, ironically titled 1905 novel about a mannerly…

Skeptics will not take easily to the optimism in Thomas Carter’s teen love story Save the Last Dance, and outright cynics may find the whole thing absurd. The notion that a sheltered white girl from shopping-mall country and a knowing black boy from the inner city can dance their way…

Playwright-filmmaker David Mamet has the sharpest gift imaginable for shooting down the sins of American greed, the con games people run to get ahead, and the corruption that comes with success. Whether he’s haunting a secondhand junk shop, a poker room, or an outlying real-estate office, he always finds enough…

About halfway through the megabudget mountain climbing adventure Vertical Limit, even the most rugged, thrill-hungry disaster movie fans may find themselves going numb. Not from the howling weather on the icy faces of K2, in the Himalayas, where the action supposedly takes place. Not from oxygen deprivation. Not even from…

The moods of Kenneth Lonergan’s You Can Count on Me are so artfully mingled that it’s difficult to get a fix on this highly personal independent feature. Set in a quiet little town in upstate New York’s lovely Catskill Mountains, it is at once a drama about the unresolved traumas…

The soon-to-be-talked-about sensations in Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream include three or four flashing, near-subliminal montages that combine an eye’s iris and dilating pupil, an extreme close-up of heroin cooking in a teaspoon, and a sucking hypodermic needle; a surpassingly frightening sequence in which Ellen Burstyn, in the midst…

Canadian filmmaker Denys Arcand (Jesus of Montréal) isn’t the first guy to skewer what Tennessee Williams called “the bitch-goddess of success.” Or to lay bare the absurdity of Andy Warhol’s 15 minutes of fame. Or to otherwise annihilate celebrity worship. But in his observant, swiftly paced Stardom, Arcand does it…

The stark simplicity of A Time for Drunken Horses, one of the few films that have slipped out of post-revolutionary Iran to the West, does nothing to obscure its emotional power or the complexity of the geopolitical issues underlying it. Filmed on location in wintry Kurdistan, it is the heartbreaking…

Any moviemaker who ventures into the sewers of New York City corruption will find Sidney Lumet’s wet footprints. In films such as The Pawnbroker, Serpico, and Q&A, this streetwise director has explored, among other things, individual morality in the face of big-city vice, and individual transcendence of ethnic conflict. Other…