Back in her early teens, Reese Witherspoon proved herself a terrific actress in her 1991 big-screen debut, The Man in the Moon. Since then, she’s done first-rate work in critical hits like Pleasantville, cult faves like Freeway and Election and underrated gems like Best Laid Plans. So how is it…

Kiss of the Dragon — the latest vehicle for martial arts star Jet Li, a mainland Chinese talent who became a superstar in Hong Kong and has since succumbed to the blandishments of Hollywood — has a little of the best (plus a lot of the worst) of Hong Kong…

Time and Tide — the latest action picture from producer/director Tsui Hark, one of the world’s great entertainers — is a compendium of many of the best (and a few of the worst) traits of Hong Kong action cinema. It’s relentlessly visceral, making you feel as if you’ve been shot…

Sexy Beast, the debut feature from British director Jonathan Glazer, is a riveting, scary and often funny foray into a traditional American genre: the gangster film. Like the western, the gangster film has always been predominantly American turf, but every decade or so, the Brits come up with an entry…

Chopper, the first feature from Australian video director Andrew Dominik — is a strong, effective but often stomach-churning portrait of notorious Aussie criminal Mark “Chopper” Read. It can be characterized as “sensational” — in both the positive and negative senses of the word. According to the filmmakers, Chopper Read is…

Im Kwon Taek has long been the best-known Korean director in America; in fact, it would be fair to say that he’s pretty much the only even vaguely known Korean director, and even then, his renown is strictly among festivalgoers. The general distribution of his latest film, Chunhyang, should be…

Director John Herzfeld’s last feature, the droll and underrated 2 Days in the Valley, from 1996, was a more than adequate counterbalance to the catastrophe of his first feature, Two of a Kind, a 1983 John Travolta vehicle which, together with Moment by Moment, put its star on the fast…

With In the Mood for Love, Wong Kar-Wai solidifies his stature as the subtlest and most idiosyncratic of Hong Kong’s directors. In an industry best known for its accessible, crowd-pleasing comedies and action films, Wong has turned out a series of increasingly risky dramas that make little or no concession…

Ridley Scott’s Hannibal, with a screenplay by David Mamet and Steven Zaillian, is being released exactly ten years after Silence of the Lambs, the film that established Hannibal Lecter as an iconic villain in our culture, right up there with Nightmare on Elm Street’s Freddy Krueger, Friday the 13th’s Jason…

Thirteen Days is a suspenseful look at the American government in the grip of a crucial, minute-to-minute, real-life crisis that threatens to destroy the country. No, it is not — as the brief time span of the title makes clear — about the recent election struggles, or the 1998 impeachment,…

Finding Forrester is the latest film from Gus Van Sant, one of the true American originals to emerge in the ’80s and ’90s. When Van Sant is at his best, he gives us stories and images we’ve never seen before. Finding Forrester, however, is not Gus Van Sant at his…

For a little over a decade, Chinese martial arts films have — directly and indirectly — gained a growing audience in America. Now the genre may gain its greatest momentum from an unlikely source — director Ang Lee, best known for such comedy/dramas of social manners as Sense and Sensibility,…

With luck, Yi Yi (A One and a Two), the seventh release from writer/director Edward Yang, one of Taiwan’s most respected filmmakers, will inspire interest in Taiwan’s cinema, but time isn’t on its side. While this is a rich and rewarding film, its pace is more leisurely than most American…

At first glance, the new Japanese import Non-Stop seems to be a crude knockoff of German director Tom Tykwer’s wonderful Run Lola Run, but Non-Stop was released in Japan (under the title Dangan Runner) in 1996, two years before Lola was shot. Could Tykwer have seen the film at a…

November may mean Thanksgiving to most of us, but in the film biz it means a rush of “serious” films trying to gouge an impression into the short memories of Oscar voters. Men of Honor has Academy Award bait written all over it. If you were to use the latest…

The current release of French director Nicole Garcia’s Place Vendôme — which was nominated for eleven César Awards when it debuted in France two years ago — is yet another sign that the dropoff in French imports that plagued U.S. screens in recent years is reversing. This is roughly the…

In recent years, the fabulous Chilean expatriate director Raoul (sometimes Raul) Ruiz has moved from shoestring-budgeted features that could qualify as avant-garde to increasingly opulent movies with major art-house stars and a shot at mainstream success. Not yet sixty, he has made more than sixty films since his 1968 debut…

Despite its late-summer release date — usually a sign of studio jitters — The Art of War is a mostly well-constructed action flick with a number of flashy, well-choreographed fight and chase scenes. Wesley Snipes stars as Neil Shaw, a super-secret operative of a super-secret “dirty tricks” agency, whose methods…

It’s a pleasure to say that Clint Eastwood reverses his recent downward slide — A Perfect World (1993), The Bridges of Madison County (1995), Absolute Power (1997) and True Crime (1999), each of which has seemed less satisfying than its predecessor — with Space Cowboys, his latest. It isn’t an…

Before we see anything in Croupier, the new film from director Mike Hodges and screenwriter Paul Mayersberg, we hear the grainy whir of the ball spinning around the rim of a roulette wheel. When the image of the wheel appears, the sound drops out, to be replaced by the affectless…

Kikujiro, the latest release from Japanese filmmaker Takeshi Kitano, will likely come as a surprise to his American fans — possibly even a disappointment — if they walk in unprepared. But in fact, the movie is altogether worthwhile, so just get yourselves prepared. Kitano initially attracted attention when his first…