“You are here to heal, so start healing!” announces a plucky nurse (Linda Bassett) to a grumbling trio of wounded men convalescing under her care in a crowded London hospital room. Dramatically, the scene marks as good a place as any to focus on writer-director Jasmin Dizdar’s complex and truly…

The gun is a coward’s weapon — always has been, always will be. Likening it to the sword is like equating rape to romance. However, for reasons that can only be attributed to collective insanity, Hollywood absolutely loves to romanticize the gun, serving as an adjunct advertising agency for the…

Calling the subject matter of Errol Morris’ latest documentary, Mr. Death, “unpleasant” is like referring to the lavatory on a tuna boat as “lightly scented.” The director who brought us the zany Americana of Fast, Cheap and Out of Control and the lukewarm Stephen Hawking snoozer, A Brief History of…

In the closing years of the 20th century, lowbrow white America finally learned to enjoy an ironic laugh at itself, led by Hollywood’s cheerful mockery of the culturally challenged working class. Outside the system, John Waters had this stuff pegged from the get-go, but the American grotesqueries of the original,…

Beating and being beaten about the head and torso until one of two bruised and bloodied humans drops — clever sport, boxing, which tops even American football for sheer poetic elegance. So it’s not surprising — and this is only half sarcastic — that so many fine films have been…

What’s going on here? A tender, patient shot of a school custodian sweeping the floor? Frequent cutaways to branches teeming with singing birds, or to an unused water tower looming like an alien monolith? Split-level houses, bric-a-brac, and a freshly renovated kitchen? Is director Eric Mendelsohn attempting, in his first…

Step right up, youth of the world, and receive the Boomer inoculation that is Wonder Boys, the first feature from director Curtis Hanson since his much-lauded adaptation of James Ellroy’s L.A. Confidential. (Indeed, this is yet another adaptation, this time of Michael Chabon’s 1995 novel.) Then marvel at Michael Douglas…

Ewan McGregor — you can’t toss a caber in Scotland these days without toppling a gaggle of blokes who closely resemble him. Yet some magical combination of talent, charm, and shrewd management has thrown wide the gates of choice projects for the young superstar, whose résumé already glows like a…

The evening of March 14, 1885, was an auspicious one in the annals of musical theater. Less than four years had passed since the opening of London’s Savoy Theatre, built specifically for the productions of librettist William Schwenk Gilbert and composer Arthur Seymour Sullivan. The partners’ first six works had…

The name Mike Leigh has been attached to some intense, intricate, generally superb character studies in the past three decades. The man has pitted Gary Oldman (as a skinhead) against Tim Roth (as a slow learner) in Meantime (1981), explored the friction of reuniting Cure-fan college chums Katrin Cartlidge and…

Boo hoo! Frank McCourt had a miserable childhood. Honestly, who can say their childhood wasn’t impoverished in some way…or in many ways? That McCourt survived and eventually published his inescapable memoir is nice, of course, and the book is indeed a poignant and crafty piece of work. Nonetheless, it seems…

“Hell is a sort of high-class nightclub,” wrote George Orwell, “entry to which is reserved for Catholics only.” This sentiment is on stark display in the work of novelist Graham Greene, whose adulterous relationship (with the very married Catherine Welston, a wealthy farmer’s wife) propelled him to scrutinize the mechanics…

Note: For the sake of being obnoxiously frank, this critic opts to divulge his favorites while pretending, in keeping with the season, to be hammered on spiked eggnog. Cheers! Honorable Mention: Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace, directed by George Lucas and his kids. Gimme a light saber to…

Ah, what a miracle that Andy Kaufman was. So sublime his wit, so pioneering his spirit. Astonishing! A hero to be loved, adored, and emulated by all artists and performers for the rest of eternity. An opener of doors, a smasher-down of barriers, a glorious, luminous, intrepid spirit without whom…

I sincerely hope Jodie Foster gets a chance to relax and unwind this holiday season, because the lady has obviously worked like a horse to instill her latest role with humanity and significance. As intrepid British widow Anna Leonowens in the huge and poetic new Anna and the King, Foster…

It’s too tempting to resist. You see, there’s a secret about Stuart Little that the fine folks at Sony don’t want to blow. It’s not that each one of the half-million computer-generated hairs on the mouse’s head is cute as the dickens. It isn’t that human stars Geena Davis and…

Nobody is innocent in America, but there is one segment of the population that seems doggedly determined to deny its own ignorance, ugliness, and violence: the redneck. The sludge on the bottom of the melting pot, this offshoot of European ancestry continues, to this day, to foment racist terrorism, religious…

Have you ever endured a relationship in which your partner beat you up mercilessly just to be able to “heal” you and play the redeemer later on? Granted, that’s a weird question and perhaps one better explored by Akbar and Jeff in Matt Groening’s Life in Hell strip, but it…

“The spectre is known at all the country firesides by the name of the Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow,” writes Washington Irving in his original fantasy. Thanks in large part to the silly, watered-down fun of the animated Disney version, the Horseman and his victim, the gangling and gallant Ichabod…

“Yesterday I wasn’t even sure God existed,” laments Bethany (Linda Fiorentino), the reluctant yet divinely touched heroine of Kevin Smith’s ambitious new film, Dogma. “Now I’m up to my ass in Christian mythology.” As it turns out, so are we. Strutting to a spiritually snappy groove not observed in mainstream…

The first rule of Being John Malkovich is you do not look at the poster for Being John Malkovich. Really, avoid that poster, despite its curious, clinical design, until after you’ve seen the movie. Plot-spoiling critics are harmless compared with what these filmmakers have opted to disclose in their own…

“That reminds me of the movies Marty made about New York,” stammered Lou Reed somewhere in the mid-’80s. “All those frank and brutal movies that are so brillyunt.” It was a clumsy, rhyme-impaired album track (“Doing the Things That We Want To” from New Sensations), but, as has often been…