Before Willy Wonka started churning out chocolate bars and Victor Van Dort inadvertently married a dead girl, Johnny Depp brought another of director Tim Burton’s adolescent fantasy figures to weird life. In 1990, Depp became Edward Scissorhands, a dangerously equipped dreamer who used his artistic dexterity on hairdos and hedges…

It’s not hard to predict how Ang Lee’s controversial Brokeback Mountain will play in John Wayne country. This romantic tragedy about a pair of lean, wind-burned cowpokes who secretly live to poke each other flies in the face of everything that most people in Casper or Riverton or Laramie think…

In his terrific new documentary Seamless, director Douglas Keeve provides a bizarre look at a contest cooked up by Vogue magazine and the Council of Fashion Designers of America to encourage the next generation of clothing designers. Although he proceeds straight-faced, Keeve seizes on some hilarious and touching incidents –…

Trekkies — and mere mortals — will argue endlessly about the best movie of Star Trek’s big-screen franchise, but in the end, most aficionados settle on Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan (1982). It’s a relentless stem-winder featuring everyone’s heroes from the original TV series — William Shatner, Leonard…

Science fiction films come and go, but Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 masterpiece, 2001: A Space Odyssey, endures as an epic of the genre. From its mysterious black slab to its defiant computer, HAL 9000, the iconography of the piece has become part of our cinematic and cultural heritage; it continues to…

Most movies intend to entertain or inform us, or even momentarily take our minds off personal problems — that bullet-riddled body in the trunk, say, or Aunt Edna’s arrest for shoplifting doughnuts. Presumably, no picture really means to make an airtight case against children. But after sitting through the witless,…

Years before those airplanes attacked a big monkey as he clung to the Empire State Building, filmmakers Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack traveled to exotic climes in their roles as documentarians. This week, Milestone Film & Video released new DVDs of two of their silent masterpieces, and anyone…

German director Wolfgang Petersen’s relentlessly strange fairy tale The NeverEnding Story (1984) has gained well-deserved cult status over the years, not least because it’s one of the only children’s movies ever made whose villain is not some evil wizard or hulking monster, but the existential void. The first English-language film…

Movie-goers with a taste for nasty villains will get all they can handle from the heavy in Swedish director Mikael Hfstrom’s Derailed. Philippe LaRoche — played with obvious relish by a craggy-faced Vincent Cassel — is not the kind of effete Frenchman you find reading poetry in the corner bistro…

Tragically, the 1994 genocide of 800,000 people in Rwanda didn’t stir the world’s conscience as it should have. A decade later, though, it sent moviemakers scurrying for the their cameras and microphones. The best-known of the films was, of course, Terry George’s fictionalized Oscar nominee Hotel Rwanda, starring Denver native…

A dozen years before The Corpse Bride got her not-so-pretty little hooks into Johnny Depp, Hollywood wizard Tim Burton gave moviegoers a labor of love in the exhausting puppet animation process. To many, The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) is every bit the equal of Bride. It’s a characteristically dark fantasy…

It’s been 85 years since Douglas Fairbanks slashed his way into the top tax bracket as the masked hero Zorro, and Hollywood still can find no reason to shut down the franchise. Technically speaking, The Legend of Zorro, starring Antonio Banderas as the guy with the sword and Catherine Zeta-Jones…

For Western viewers willing to spend 143 minutes inside a cocoon-like Chinese theme park littered with scaled-down reproductions of the Eiffel Tower, the Piazza San Marco and the Taj Mahal, Jia Zhangke’s The World (2004) can be a rewarding experience. As with the bogus pyramids and ersatz Empire State Buildings…

The protagonist of Lodge Kerrigan’s deeply moving, uncomfortably intimate Keane is the kind of pariah most urban dwellers will do anything to avoid. Rocking foot to foot, the poor man mutters angrily to himself or shouts at the air, a captive of demons that only he can hear. Eyes bloodshot,…

When we first see the protagonist of North Country, a working-class heroine portrayed by a deglamorized Charlize Theron, she’s sporting a black eye and a slight limp, the results of an encounter with her abusive husband. We soon learn that Josey Aimes is only now beginning to take her lumps…

The anguished paintings of Edvard Munch, who was born in 1863, foreshadowed expressionism and provided uneasy visual correlatives to the horror and loneliness of the twentieth century. But it wasn’t until 1974 — three decades after the Norwegian painter’s death — that a filmmaker captured the spirit of Munch’s work…

Two years before he stunned the film world with 1972’s Last Tango in Paris, 29-year-old Bernardo Bertolucci directed The Conformist, a deeply unsettling portrait of a Fascist secret policeman (Jean-Louis Trintignant) who represses his true urges — social and sexual — in a cowardly attempt to embrace the dangerous ideological…

More than a decade before post-war revolutionists such as Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut and the other enfants terribles of the New Wave forever transformed French cinema, that country’s film industry endured the peculiar trauma of German occupation. Between 1940 and 1944, the Nazis purged French moviemaking of Jews and Communists,…

Anyone vaguely familiar with the rules of golf knows that you may not improve your lie, ground your club in a sand trap or — most grievous of all — subtract strokes from your score. This last one apparently never occurred to the makers of a new movie with the…