A Very Long Engagement, the new film by French director Jean-Pierre Jeunet (most famously of Amélie), will have its fans. For one thing, there’s no denying its beauty, an onslaught of gorgeous tableaux, painstakingly arranged and shot through filters to exclude colors that don’t suit (i.e., anything other than sepia…

Throughout p.s. , a thoughtful, self-possessed film from director Dylan Kidd (Roger Dodger), there is a sense of the disaster it could have been. A 39-year-old woman, divorced and emotionally shuttered, meets an adoring, adorable young man. The boy (compared to her, he’s a child) is a replica of her…

When was the last time you saw Paul Giamatti? And when the film ended, did you realize how much you would miss him? It was just last year that Giamatti played the hilariously beleaguered Harvey Pekar in American Splendor, a role that he occupied with slumped, head-hanging perfection. Yet as…

Whatever else can be said about Tarnation–and there is plenty to say–there is no denying this: It is a very brave movie. Rarely is the subject of a documentary willing to lay himself bare before the camera, exposing his very consciousness to the audience, and it’s still more uncommon for…

How does Mike Leigh do it? The years pass; film fashions come and go; Hollywood churns its commercial pap. Careers sparkle; others fizz; whom the gods would destroy, they first make famous. Meanwhile, over in England, Leigh makes his films, tracking the intricacies of the lower-class family with the patience…

The very best thing about A Dirty Shame, a giddy sex farce from John Waters, is the credits. What’s not to love about a list of characters that includes “Sylvia Stickles,” “Marge the Neuter,” “Fat Fuck Frank,” “Cow Patty” and “Tire Lick Boy”? The soundtrack, too, bears comic fruit, with…

In Victorian England, 40,000 novels were published every year. Of the few that have endured, perhaps none is more worthy of a film adaptation than Vanity Fair, if for no other reason than this: It’s a chore to read. Clocking in at 850 pages, with frequent excursions into unrelated subjects…

Oh, Janis. Oh, gorgeous, outrageous, soul-ripping, rockin’ bluesy momma Janis Joplin. She’s a volcano. She’s a tsunami. She’s a fearless, reckless, raging American beauty. Watch her tear open her chest to reveal her hot, pulsing wounds. Watch her rage with burning, glorious light. Watch her smile that sweet Janis smile…

In We Don’t Live Here Anymore, an overwrought domestic drama about a pair of entangled couples, Peter Krause plays philandering writer Hank Evans, struggling to produce as he propositions female students at the college where he teaches. Blithely pretentious, fretful only over his writing, Hank observes from a distance as…

Every once in a while, a film comes along that so blatantly disregards emotional authenticity that one fears for the sanity of its director. Can he actually believe that people talk this way? Act this way? Do these things? Worse, can he think he has made a coherent and feeling…

Garry Marshall is at it again. The director of Pretty Woman, Beaches and the original Princess Diaries has returned to peddle his particular brand of überschmaltz in The Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement, in which he disguises an insidious worship of wealth and privilege as a “feel-good” comedy about a…

Near the beginning of The Corporation, a damning documentary designed to expose everything that is irresponsible, immoral, inhumane and lethal about corporations, the narrator posits the film’s thesis: “We present the corporation as a paradox,” she says, “an institution that creates great wealth but causes enormous and often hidden harm.”…

The opening moments of The Door in the Floor are not promising. A little girl stands on a chair in a hallway of photos, pointing at the images and speaking about them. Soon, she is joined by a middle-aged man, probably her father, who takes her on a tour through…

Samurai have never been strangers to film; in fact, an entire genre has sprung from their legend, with plenty of attendant offshoots, cross-pollinators and beneficiaries (Westerns, slasher films, Star Wars). Lately, the feudal Japanese warriors have enjoyed a particular bounty of screen time: 2003 brought us The Last Samurai, in…

It’s charming. It’s hilarious. It is perhaps the most beautifully crafted, lovingly rendered portrait of extreme geekitude ever to grace the screen. It’s Napoleon Dynamite–the first feature film from 24-year-old Brigham Young University student Jared Hess–and, if there is any justice, it’s going to be huge. Remember that kid who…

Every once in a while, you encounter a person who seems to have been born under an urgent, righteous star–a person who is both a fiery activist lit with the passion of his convictions and a dramatic storyteller who naturally occupies a place in the public eye. When this person…

Ah, the peculiar genius that is Guy Maddin. Who else but the morose Canadian director, born and raised in one of the coldest cities in the world, would marry silent film, 1930s movie musicals, Prohibition, family melodrama, critique of capitalist zeal and monster-movie gore in a surreal montage about sorrow…

If you’ve seen a movie at a Landmark theater in the past year or so, you’ve probably enjoyed the trailer for Shaolin Soccer. Over a lilting Asian flute that morphs into pounding percussion, airborne soccer players execute kung fu moves that send the ball blazing across the field (or, in…

Those of us who grew up in the United States may be weary of our country’s claims of freedom and opportunity. Faced with a wobbly quote from our leader attributing terrorism to envy, we might roll our eyes, aware of a reality far darker and more complex. But there are…

She’s a pre-med farm girl intent on administering to the world’s suffering children. He’s a car-racing Danish prince looking to shed the burdens of royal duty. They’re both in America’s heartland, where they share a chem lab, an employer and a penchant for driving fast. What, pray tell, is going…

If you were a college-aged East Berliner in October 1989, chances are that your time was occupied by one of several things. Protesting comes to mind, as does hacking at long-reviled concrete. Perhaps you caroused, or lit fireworks, or sang with joy as you coursed through the newly open streets…

If you were expecting the first film to emerge from Afghanistan since the defeat of the Taliban to be even remotely celebratory, you’ll have to adjust your expectations. Radically. In Osama, filmed in 2002 and 2003 in a “suburb” of Kabul, writer-director Siddiq Barmak is not interested in showing us…