Takeoff from a true story, presumably far, far off, about a team of MIT math whizzes who, drilled by a Mephistophelean mentor on the faculty, visit Vegas on weekends to beat the house at blackjack. The film is not able to make the frowned-upon practice of “card counting” comprehensible, much …

Punishingly dull biopic on history's most fabled aviatrix, Amelia Earhart (portrayed by Hilary Swank, with traces of Katharine Hepburn rather than of Kansas wheatfields in her speech), her final flight endlessly interrupted by how-she-got-there flashbacks. The only suspense is in whether the film is going to offer an ending or …

Paul Schrader's Bressonian portrait of a high-priced Beverly Hills gigolo: adolescently admiring and envying, but never very informative or inventive. Less than halfway through the thing, the gigolo's professional life gives way to the more automatically plottable business of a murder frameup, with the gigolo's every step shadowed by unknown …

Director Nicholas Jarecki sets out to make you sympathize with a scumbag, and comes very close to succeeding. Yes, his protagonist is a rich Wall Street bastard, trying to game the system in the age of Occupy and Bernie Madoff. Yes, he's a philanderer, waxing familial at his birthday party …

Joan Chen's worlds-apart followup to her first film, Xiu Xiu, the Sent-Down Girl, brings together Richard Gere and Winona Ryder as the perfect couple: he'll never grow up, and she'll never grow old. (Peter Pan Complex and heart condition, respectively.) A cure is possible, for either or both, but not …

Co-directors Scott McGehee and David Siegel, fresh from The Deep End, turn to a novel by Myla Goldberg. And on the evidence it's difficult to see how anyone could have thought there was a movie in it, even someone in the full flush of the spelling-bee documentary, Spellbound. Fictional spelling …

The cast of characters includes a whisky-sodden British diplomat, an ex-prostitute Indian wife, an ex-seminarian Paraguayan rebel, an apolitical, amoral doctor with allegiances to all of the above, an implacable South American policeman -- well, it's Graham Greene, you see. The Honorary Consul, to be precise. The abbreviated TV style …

What Jim McBride has done with the Jean-Luc Godard original, whether by conscious choice or by native temperament, is to translate it back into the film noir idiom from which Godard first snatched it. It is a pretty straight Americanization, in other words, of what was a Frenchification of something …

Crime drama treats what would be an historically bad week for the NYPD as simply the average run. Amid a series of racially charged shooting incidents, three diverse policemen (the brink-of-retirement beat cop, the stressed-out undercover cop, the off-the-rails rogue cop) pursue their individual paths on what we come to …

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 …

You might well have expected that a movie called The Cotton Club would actually be about the Cotton Club. But no. The movie is not so much about it as around and about it. One of the main characters owns the place. A couple of others work there. Others of …

If the Time-Life publishers commissioned a picture book on the Great American Bread Basket, ca. World War I, they'd probably want it to look like this -- a thing you could be proud to place on your coffee table. You never know for sure what the picturesque Thomas Hart Benton …

This big-screen adaptation of Herman Koch’s Dutch novel was originally scheduled to be Cate Blanchett’s directorial debut. Instead, the job went to screenwriter Owen Moverman, and we’re left to wonder what if. A pair of privileged cousins film the murder of a homeless woman whom they decide to torch pretty …

More specifically, a Dallas gynecologist (Richard Gere, with a tidier haircut and a sincerer persona) and his psychotic wife, his materialistic sister-in-law, his protective and adoring receptionist, his numerous demanding patients, a country-club golf pro who becomes his new lover, and his two grown daughters, one of whom is soon …

A frosted-haired, bug-cute psychotherapist (Richard Gere) gets sucked into a quag of incest, infidelity, "pathological intoxication," murder, sotto voce dialogue, fat lips (Uma Thurman's), fatter lips (Kim Basinger's), shadows, fog, blue light. George Fenton's musical score tries hard to make you think of Hitchcock, by way of Bernard Herrmann. Perhaps …