The screenwriter Steven Conrad writes movies about success and self-fulfillment in America—how we define it, the price we pay for it and what it looks like depending on where you’re standing. In Conrad’s The Weather Man, the central figure was a vain TV news personality who had everything that money…

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: A lonely dwarf, a wisecracking Cuban-American and a grieving mother walk into each other’s lives, laugh together, cry together, grow, change and heal each other’s emotional wounds. Cue Sundance prizes, Miramax pickup, torrent of glowing reviews and a surprisingly robust indie box-office…

Chalk it up to personal preference, but I’ve always been fonder of those comic-book heroes who emerge by intent rather than happenstance. I mean the ones, like Batman’s Bruce Wayne, whose transformation from average Joe into masked crusader is an act of will instead of the unintended result of a…

When Time recently featured George Clooney on its cover accompanied by the headline “The Last Movie Star”—note not even a question mark at the end—you didn’t have to read the article to know where it was coming from. After all, stars of the postpubescent variety are an increasingly rare commodity…

Considering that the war in Iraq has proven to be Washington’s shot-by-shot remake of Vietnam, it’s only natural that Hollywood has followed suit, giving us a series of Iraq-themed films that can be set neatly alongside their Vietnam-era counterparts. Just as the initial wave of angry anti-Vietnam documentaries (In the…

Last fall, The Band’s Visit made headlines after being disqualified as Israel’s foreign-language submission to the 2008 Academy Awards—an ironic fate, indeed, for a movie that takes language as its very subject. The official ruling of the Oscar referees was that too much of the film’s dialogue is in English,…

Remember the 1985 movie version of the Parker Brothers whodunit board game Clue, with its pre-DVD-era gimmick of multiple endings? Well, Vantage Point is like that, only instead of multiple endings, it gives us multiple beginnings. Oh, and Vantage Point, to the best of my knowledge, isn’t supposed to be…

When a friend recently told me that she’d been confused by the poster for the Matthew McConaughey-Kate Hudson fortune-hunting romp Fool’s Gold adorning her local multiplex—that she’d thought for sure this movie had already come and gone—I understood her bewilderment. Even as a professional film critic trained in such nigh-impossible…

Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden’s Sugar, which premiered in the U.S. Dramatic Competition at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival (and was inexplicably shut out at the closing-night awards ceremony), gets as much right about baseball as any movie I’ve ever seen. It gets the hum of the electric lights in…

It took nine years for Godzilla to rise up out of the ashes of Hiroshima and wreak his destruction on the good people of Tokyo in 1954. Here in America, it’s taken just over six years for the idea of an escapist disaster movie set on the streets of New…

“I do think the writing is pessimistic—all that stuff about life being a tragic experience,” says Angela Stark (played by newcomer Hayley Atwell) early in Woody Allen’s Cassandra’s Dream. An actress talking about the play she’s appearing in at a small London theater, Stark could just as well be describing…

Eleven months after winning the screenplay and audience awards at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, writer-director James C. Strouse’s Grace Is Gone has received a musical makeover care of Clint Eastwood, who reportedly screened the film and thought that it could do with a new original score, which he offered…

The first thing you notice when you walk on to the set are the 300 extras in late-1920s period costume, seated at cafeteria tables in a holding area, gazing up at you in their wool suits (for the men) and cloche hats (for the women) as if all of this…

It’s that time of year again. Our six critics don’t always (or often) agree, but we’ve combined their top 10 lists (allowing for ties) to pretend like they do! So without further ado, the 10 (or 15) best movies of the year, kind of: There Will Be Blood The Texas…

At this year’s Cannes Film Festival, the American painter turned filmmaker Julian Schnabel (Basquiat, Before Night Falls) won the jury’s Best Director award for The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, his French-language adaptation of the best-selling memoir by the late Elle magazine editor Jean-Dominique Bauby. Felled by a massive stroke…

Here’s the thing: Tim Burton pulled it off. Nearing the end of an uncommonly strong year for American movies, he’s taken a hallowed classic of the modern musical theater, hemmed in the narrative from well over two hours to well under, cast confessed non-singers in the principal roles and somehow…

There are two momentous performances in the Darwinian horror fable I Am Legend. One is by the movie’s star, Will Smith—but more about him in a minute. The other is by the movie’s visual effects—not the ones that bring to life a nocturnal army of shrieking, carnivorous beasties (though those…

Something about that movie though, well I just can’t get it out of my head/But I can’t remember why I was in it or what part I was supposed to play. —Bob Dylan, “Brownsville Girl” Literally speaking, Bob Dylan isn’t “there” in Todd Haynes’ staggering mix-tape biopic I’m Not There…

“Hold still”—it’s what the hunters say to the hunted in the Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men. The first time we hear it, it’s the out-of-work Vietnam vet Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) whispering optimistically to the antelope he spies through his rifle sight while perched on the crest of…

Although he plays a college professor in his latest film, Robert Redford was, by his own admission, never much of a student, consistently more interested in what was going on outside the classroom window than inside. But there’s one moment from Redford’s academic past that burns brightly in his memory…

“There’s a reason I’ve had some good pictures and other guys will never have good pictures,” Sidney Lumet says matter-of-factly on a recent afternoon in his New York office — four cramped white walls, unadorned by awards or other memorabilia, on the top floor of the Ansonia Building, where Enrico…

To some, the story of Christopher Johnson McCandless, the 24-year-old Emory University graduate who starved to death in the Alaskan wilderness in the spring of 1992, will never be anything more than a case of a spoiled bourgeois brat with half-cocked survivalist fantasies (and possible suicidal tendencies) who ran away…