Cell phones and silk saris, dot-coms and arranged marriages–the latest film from Indian-born director Mira Nair (Salaam Bombay!, Mississippi Masala) captures the heady mix of old and new, rich and poor, traditional and modern that defines contemporary India. A sort of Father of the Bride set in New Delhi, it…

Amélie, minus most of the charm. With that film’s star, Audrey Tautou, heading an ensemble cast, this romantic comedy is about how even the most random and mundane acts affect destiny. Every chance encounter between strangers has a repercussion, which leads to another interaction and another and another until, eventually,…

Set in Berlin in 1943, this fact-based German film with English subtitles concerns the love affair between two women: a Jew passing as a gentile while working for the underground and a German housewife honored by the Third Reich as an exemplar of Nazi motherhood. Outgoing, direct, supremely self-confident, the…

Part comedy, part tragedy and all bite, No Man’s Land damns and mocks in equal measure, painting a picture of war’s absurdity that should make peaceniks of us all but likely won’t. Although set in the former Yugoslavia during the Bosnian-Serbian war, the movie transcends its geographic borders: Bosnian-born writer-director…

To call a movie the most accessible Dogme 95 film ever made is not merely damning with faint praise. It also threatens to alienate the two segments of the population that might consider going to see such a film in the first place: fans of the back-to-basics, no-frills-of-any-kind Danish filmmaking…

Cate Blanchett can do no wrong, but even she can’t save Charlotte Gray, a World War II drama that never rises above the level of a 1950s-era adolescent romance novel. The Australian-born actress, who should have won an Academy Award for her performance in 1998’s Elizabeth, plays the titular character,…

It is difficult to imagine a more timely film than Focus; certainly, its message about intolerance resonates in a post-September 11 world in ways the filmmakers never anticipated. Adapted from Arthur Miller’s little-known 1945 novel of the same title, Focus looks at what happens to a society when basically decent…

Against a completely black background comes the low, ominous rumbling of thunder. A sense of unease washes over the viewer. When the first images appear on screen, they only heighten our level of apprehension, because in the middle of a curvy mountain road lies a figure. There is no way…

The Italian film Bread and Tulips is a first cousin once removed of the American comedy Home Alone. A tremendous hit in Italy (it won nine Donatello awards last year, the Italian equivalent of the Oscars), it concerns a woman who, on a bus holiday with her family, accidentally gets…

Chalk up another one for George Dubya. Recently, the U.S. Immigration Department refused to allow acclaimed Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi, director of both the Oscar-nominated The White Balloon and the Venice Film Festival Golden Lion-winner The Circle, to change planes in New York on his way from Hong Kong to…

Even more than the recent Depression-era comedy O Brother, Where Art Thou?, the turn-of-the-century drama Songcatcher is an absolute treasure trove of old-timey, traditional folk music. Set in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Appalachia in 1907, the film follows city-bred musicologist Dr. Lily Penleric (Janet McTeer) as she traverses the…

Like nearly all Merchant-Ivory productions, The Golden Bowl, its latest book-to-film adaptation, is a feast for the eyes, with choice real estate, exquisite interior design and dazzling costumes all bathed in a golden light that not only enriches the colors but also helps to give the settings a sense of…

One doesn’t watch Amores Perros (Love’s a Bitch) so much as absorb–like a body blow. “I wanted to make a movie that smelled of filth,” Alejandro González Inárritu has said about his feature directorial debut. He has succeeded beyond perhaps even his wildest dreams. One of this year’s Academy Award…

The 20th century is replete with examples of unconscionable crimes carried out in the name of some quasi-political, military, or religious cause–acts of such misguided judgment and mindless brutality. The My Lai massacre of 1968, in which American GIs gunned down more than 500 Vietnamese civilians, most of them women…

In Hollywood, all it takes is one big hit. Sandra Bullock’s ticket to stardom was the 1994 sleeper Speed, a rip-roaring action/crime thriller that elevated co-star Keanu Reeves to similar megawatt status. With her cute girl-next-door looks and ingratiating physical klutziness Bullock established an instant rapport with audiences. That perception…

Fascinating and engrossing on every conceivable level, this beautifully constructed feature-length documentary opens with the mournful sound of a train and images of toys and books that sit untouched in what was once a child’s bedroom. As the credit sequence ends, an elderly woman addresses an unseen interviewer, recalling the…

Early in Spanish director Carlos Saura’s stunning new film, the 82-year-old protagonist, the great 19th-century painter Francisco de Goya, awakens from a disturbing dream and rises to see an apparition of his lost love, the Duchess of Alba. Following her down a surrealistically white hallway, he suddenly finds himself outdoors…

I didn’t know about comedienne-actress Margaret Cho’s struggles with depression and drug and alcohol addiction, nor about her near-death from kidney failure brought on by extreme dieting. In fact, I didn’t know anything about her at all except that she had been the star of a short-lived television sitcom I…

I never imagined the day would come when I would cringe to see Ralph Fiennes onscreen. Not only is he shamelessly good-looking but, whether playing the brooding, remote figure doomed by love in The English Patient or the bloodless commandant of a Nazi death camp in Schindler’s List, he projects…

The moody, feverish images that fill Running Free are so exquisite, they almost make up for the film’s disastrous auditory misstep: the decision to cast Lukas Haas as the voice of Lucky, the chestnut foal that narrates this unusual adventure story. A cross between Nicholas Roeg’s Walkabout and Jean-Jacques Annaud’s…

It is difficult to reconcile American perceptions of Iran–a rigidly authoritarian fundamentalist Islamic society–with the captivating and compassionate films that emanate from the country. Most of these pictures, including the 1995 Cannes Film Festival Camera d’Or winner The White Balloon and the 1998 best foreign-language film Oscar nominee Children of…