The original novel by Michael Connelly seemed to have been written with a movie in mind: one of those overblown, overheated thrillers whose villain is a taunting, string-pulling, game-playing archfiend of boogeyman dimensions. Clint Eastwood (cited, for unspecified services, in the book's acknowledgments) has made a better movie of it …

Paul Greengrass's masochistic re-enactment of the costly collision — thirteen dead, fourteen wounded — between outlawed Catholic protest marchers and itchy-fingered English peacekeepers in Londonderry, Northern Ireland, 1972. The English are not demonized, but you can tell whose side the filmmaker is on, long before the obligatory airing of the …

A paradigm, practically a parody, of the American Independent Film, the coming-of-age of a vulnerable high-school girl (the conventionally "pretty" Agnes Bruckner, whose discomfort is contagious), with an overtaxed mother ("You're an ungrateful brat!"), an absent father, a self-mutilating little sister, a nose-ringed bosom buddy, and a caring English teacher …

Can the local Hawaiian surfer chick bounce back from a near drowning, conquer her fear, and win the Pipemasters Contest at the same time as she romances a GQ NFL QB? Director John Stockwell, of Crazy/Beautiful, murmurs some feminist sweet nothings, but his PC lip service is overcome by a …

Those who had been backing Doug Liman as a vital new maverick director (Swingers, Go) will have their work cut out for them on this one, a middle-of-the-road adaptation of the Robert Ludlum best-seller about an amnesiac spy, previously made as a two-part TV miniseries starring Richard Chamberlain and Jaclyn …

Michael Moore's engaging and enraging documentary on gun culture in America, and by extension violence, homicide, and the climate of fear in America. Dishevelled as ever in his baggy clothes and collection of ballcaps (one of them emblazoned with "Writer"), usually unshaven, a definitive schlump, he is still his own …

Sensibly scaled portrait of the Greek soprano, captured well past her prime, when she was involved in a project of dubious artistic integrity, lip-syncing on film to an earlier recording of Carmen. Fanny Ardant, as dark and dramatic-looking as the real diva, conveys the appropriate amount of passion -- which …

Lightweight Spielberg (as compared, say, with the immediately preceding Minority Report, never mind Schindler's List or Amistad), an admiring, even envying portrait of a real-life teenage imposter and check forger in the late 1960s, Frank Abagnale, Jr. His excuse: his father's financial woes, his move to a new school, his …

The return of Hiroyuki Morita's animated tale of a young girl who finds herself involuntarily engaged to a cat prince.

Peter Bogdanovich's "comeback" -- meaning that the director of The Last Picture Show, etc., has come back from the TV-movie wasteland, if not necessarily that he has come back very far. A cramped and scrimping stage adaptation (written for the screen by the original playwright, Steven Peros), it chews over …

Samuel L. Jackson and Ben Affleck get into a fender-bender on the FDR on their separate ways to the courthouse, the one to divorce court, the other to probate court. The first, an operatically repentant alcoholic, unable to drive away from the scene of the accident, loses custody of his …

Shot-on-video indie, written and directed by Eric Byler, takes an interest in the unstereotyped private life of a taciturn Asian-American auto mechanic ("Specializing in German cars"), an area of existence into which Hollywood hasn't much inclination to shine a klieg light. It uncovers mystery and intrigue within its mundanity. Jacqueline …

Little more than an accompaniment to an eclectic soundtrack of pop songs (Hall and Oates, Modern English, America, 10cc, Soft Cell, the Human League, the Turtles, and of course the title tune by the Association), though the songs are better integrated than in most such cases. Which is to say …

How quaint: a Broadway musical transferred to the screen! (Directed and choreographed by Rob Marshall.) Apologetically self-conscious and campy, despite the present-day "relevance" of the courtroom antics and media manipulation in a sensational murder trial of the Jazz Age. (Commemorated already in William Wellman's rambunctious Roxie Hart.) There's a good …