Though this is as different from previous Coen brothers movies as all of those are different from each other, it nonetheless picks up the interest of Barton Fink in the issues of commercialism, success, popularity -- the whole American, and particularly Hollywooden, ethos. That earlier movie confused a lot of …

Highly unusual and no less highly unfunny comedy of Big Themes: animal vs. human, nature vs. civilization, id vs. superego. An ape woman (Patricia Arquette), hairy-chested at the age of twelve, a Queen Kong sideshow act at twenty, a reclusive nature writer as a young adult (best-seller: Fuck Humanity), seems …

Fred Schepisi's loose and lagging companion to his Roxanne: slightly brainy, slightly barmy romantic comedies. In this one, Albert Einstein plays Cupid to his mathematician niece and a nice young auto mechanic conversant with cosmic questions by way of the sci-fi pulps. Walter Matthau, flanked by a trio of fellow …

No, it isn't a portrayal of the Biblical vision that Arnold Schoenberg had hoped to turn into an oratorio of the same name. The advance advertising campaign tried to make it look like a horror film, tried to hide the fact that it was actually a Vietnam film, tried (to …

Contrived road movie wherein three wounded vets from the Iraq War, strangers to one another stranded at a shut-down airport, drive westbound in a rental car: a latter-generation The Best Years of Our Lives, better thought of as The Forgettable Year of Our Lives. (Sample contrivance: the soldier wounded in …

The first Coen brothers film to disappoint. That's not to say it's not good, certainly not to say it's not even as good as their first, Blood Simple, when there could be no expectations and so no disappointment. The brothers have not suddenly lost their touch. They do for Billy …

A gentle story that is no less profound for being so. Michael Almereyda directs and adapts Jordan Harrison’s play about memory — and also, what it means to be a person. Put less abstractly: various members of a wealthy, melancholy family spend time chatting with holographic computer simulations of deceased …

It would have been understandable if, after the exertions of Mystic River, Clint Eastwood were to revert to the relaxation mode of Blood Work, Space Cowboys, True Crime, Absolute Power. For a while, it would appear he had done just that. This sets up as a nice, light workout of …

Besides being the title of the movie, this is the title of the Yazoo City, Mississippi, beauty queen. The chief pretender to that throne is played by Holly Hunter, who played her also in the original play. That, of course, was before Hunter's movie career took off so vertically, and …

Brian De Palma in command of Mission Control -- and it is not a happy sight to see this alumnus of the New Hollywood circa 1969-75, this ape of Welles and Hitchcock, this former pet of Pauline Kael, hurl himself headlong into the maelstrom of special effects. The image of …

Clint Eastwood's somber meditation on chance, fate, doom; scarred souls and endless repercussions; violence begetting violence. Just as Unforgiven was an act of penance for body counts in his Sergio Leone spaghetti Westerns as well as in his self-directed imitation Leones (High Plains Drifter, The Outlaw Josey Wales, Pale Rider), …

An ever-the-twain-shall-meet comedy -- black and white, poor and rich, foe and finally friend -- whose few deft touches are swiftly engulfed. Writer and director Steve Oedekerk steals his own show -- not so hard to do -- in a brief on-screen appearance as a night watchman with an overactive …

A road comedy, “based upon The Odyssey by Homer,” about three chain-gang fugitives in Depression-era Mississippi. (The title, should you need reminding, comes from Preston Sturges’s Sullivan’s Travels: the proposed title for a “meaningful” film by a refractory Hollywood contract director, whose subsequent quest to get in touch with the …

Aid workers Benicio Del Toro and Tim Robbins just want to help. Specifically, they want to get a dead body out of a well in mid-’90s Eastern Europe. But first, they need some rope. Fernando León de Aranoa directs.

Robert Altman's addition to the Hollywood-on-Hollywood library certainly lifted his sagging reputation, though the reasons for its critical success may have had less to do with its intrinsic merits than with its usefulness as a discussion starter, a conversational ice-breaker. More like dam-breaker. It gave the critic an opening to …