Based on the David Mamet play, Sexual Perversity in Chicago, adapted by Tim Kazurinsky and Denise DeClue, and directed by first-timer Edward Zwick. The movie, wherever it gets it from, and however deeply buried beneath slickness, cuteness, soupiness, pop songs, montages, and assorted froufrou, has something a little special about …

Serviceable action-adventure despite frequent interruptions for sermonettes on human rights and capitalist wrongs. The ripped-from-the-headlines story (yesterday's headlines: civil war in Sierra Leone, 1999) features the stock figures of a self-interested soldier of fortune, in league with slaughterous rebels and unscrupulous jewellers, an engagé foreign correspondent, and a hapless native …

Long overdue Hollywood solemnization of the Gulf War. The investigation of the first woman nominated (posthumously) for a combat Medal of Honor is expected to be a rubber-stamp procedure, leading posthaste to a photo-op at the White House, with the President draping the ribbon round the neck of the dead …

Workmanlike account of the untold (or anyhow unfilmed) true story of a 20th-century Moses and his two brothers, who sheltered hundreds of Jews from the Nazis in the forests of Belorussia, such dark days that color itself evidently went into hiding, leaving behind only a greeny or occasionally orangey residue. …

A less familiar but immeasurably meaningful chapter of Civil War history, a sort of precursory case of affirmative action, to do with the formation of the first black fighting unit in the United States. The unprecedented and unrepeatable circumstances of this story are special enough, unique enough, to refreshen even …

More like Jack Creaker, amirite? Yeah, it’s a lousy joke, but then, it’s a lousy movie, and lousy or not, it’s a propos: dated, silly, and more than a little bit cheap. Tom Cruise returns to his embodiment of a mid-century American masculine fantasy: an ex-military superman who’s gotta ramble, …

Tom Cruise as "one of the most decorated warriors this nation has ever known," circa 1876, a tormented Civil War vet and Indian fighter who is hired as a mercenary to train the troops of the Japanese emperor to combat a renegade samurai, and who is then taken captive by …

The title tells too much. Or rather the rest of it tells too little else. An abused housewife and an earthy waitress (no, not Thelma and Louise but Marianne and Darly) head out on a picaresque odyssey to Alaska, cheered along by some tinkly (and thump-thumpy) New Age jazz, but …

Edward Zwick, one-time director of Glory, has here reassumed some epic aspirations, or epic postures and gestures at any rate, in the matter of an all-male family of four on a Montana horse ranch reminiscent of Bonanza's Ponderosa (Eng. trans., ponderous; labored; lumpish). The unspooling storyline, however, never generates the …

It’s tough to make a compelling character out of someone suffering from mental illness; ultimately, all you can do is look on with pity and horror. (And also sympathy, thanks to some hammer-subtle backstory.) It’s even tougher to make a national hero out of one. But when it’s 1972 and …

The siege in fact began months before the movie came out, with pre-emptive protests from the Arab-American community. The storyline of a series of Arab terrorist attacks resulting in the imposition of martial law in Brooklyn — though not until perhaps an hour and a quarter into the hour-and-three-quarters running …