Writer and co-director Charlie Kaufman’s stop-motion animated film is a very fine portrait of the despair at the heart of a comfortable middle-aged white man in America circa right about now. British-born Michael Stone (voiced with great sympathy by David Thewlis) has, by most standards, made it. He lives in …

Sharon Stone, pushing fifty, takes her femme fatale act to London, along with her sandblasted face and helium-inflated boobs. There is an exculpatory spirit of self-parody in it, but then there already was, in the 1992 predecessor. The thing about any sort of parody, self- or otherwise, is that it …

Besides the prefix and suffix of its title, this shares with Beloved the spectacle of Thandie Newton peeing on her own feet, puking, and behaving generally as if possessed by Linda Blair. Her character is that of a refugee from an African dictatorship, now a maid in Italy. Her master, …

Screenwriter and first-time director Caroline Thompson's repayment of debt to one of her girlhood favorites, the Victorian perennial by Anna Sewell. It proceeds at a metronomic clip-clop pace, and there's very little narrative development: what little there is comes literally straight from the horse's mouth. ("It was cold and bright …

A Knight of the Old Code and a computer-generated talking dragon (cultured voice of Sean Connery) join forces to rid the realm of the evil ruler. Do all dragons talk? We don't know, because this is The Last Dragon, but no one in the late 10th Century seems taken aback …

The classic story of the upwardly mobile mobster, retold in fish-and-chips British accents, fish-eye lenses, slow-motion, split screens, coarse and corroded color, flashbacks and flashforwards, not to mention Dahmer-esque or Ed Gein-ian peaks of gore. At the hard heart of the film is the scene (with thanks to Tarantino) in …

The tension between public perception and private history is always at the core of Egoyan’s work. Jim (David Thewlis) is a persnickety, permanently punched-in city health inspector. Though not a religious man, when his time came, the widower left instructions with his daughter Veronica (Laysla de Oliveira) that he be …

Or for short, Pot III. It has a new director — Alfonso Cuarón, of A Little Princess and, less pertinently, Y Tu Mamá También — and a new Dumbledore — Michael Gambon, in place of the late Richard Harris — in addition to new roles for the likes of Gary …

Second remake, at the least, of the H.G. Wells fable of the beast in man and vice versa, originally made in the early Thirties under the name of Island of Lost Souls. Marlon Brando, as the mad doctor-slash-dictator, makes a splashy entrance half an hour into the action, in Tiny …

Or, One More Reason Why the Middle East Hates the West. Back, back, back to the 12th Century, back to before the Third Crusade ("To kill an infidel is not murder, it is the path to heaven"), equipped with cultural relativism, vats of blood, miles of slow-motion, and wave after …

Despite touches of brutality, this dramatized salute to tireless Burmese freedom leader Aung San Suu Kyi is too ladylike. Michelle Yeoh plays her like a cross between Gandhi and Audrey Hepburn, and Luc Besson’s direction often seems like a civics lesson. David Thewlis plays the heroine’s almost equally suffering British …

Colin Farrell, all grown up and polished smooth, plays a roughneck ex-con trying to escape the unsavory associations of his past (greasy Ben Chaplin) and embrace the associations of his decidedly brighter future (reclusive actress-in-need-of-protection Keira Knightley). The story? Hoary. But the cast is masterful, especially Ray Winstone as a …

For fans of Mike Leigh (High Hopes, Life Is Sweet), a bitter disappointment. It shows no letdown in his sense of character and environment: to wit, totally individualized and vivid caricatures, set off against a realistic backdrop -- an effect not unlike the cartooned Roger and Jessica Rabbit afoot in …

Two-and-a-quarter-hour history lesson, trimmed down from two and a half after its initial release, on John Smith and Pocahontas, and the latter's marriage to another, John Rolfe, and her intended sojourn in England which became instead her eternal rest. Terrence Malick's account is not a love story, or not just …

Calculatingly released in theaters on 06/06/06 (i.e., 666, get it?), but not, heaven forbid, a fourth sequel, an Omen 5, but rather a straight remake of the 1976 original, about the advent of the anti-Christ (presaged now by the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster, 9/11, the Indian Ocean tsunamis of 2004) …