American Gangster is a movie with obvious gravitas and a familiar argument: Organized crime is outsider capitalism. As archetypal as its title, Ridley Scott’s would-be epic aspires to enshrine Harlem dope king Frank Lucas in Hollywood heaven, heir to Scarface and the Godfather. Or, as suggested by the Mark Jacobson…

Named for the spot in Christian-fundamentalist hell where sinners are condemned to spend eternity, Tony Kaye’s Lake of Fire is a provocatively beautiful movie on the hottest hot-button issue in American life: a woman’s right to an abortion. The British-born Kaye, an enormously successful maker of deluxe TV commercials, relocated…

I’ve said it before and hope to again: David Cronenberg is the most provocative, original and consistently excellent North American director of his generation. From Videodrome (1983) through A History of Violence (2005), neither Scorsese nor Spielberg nor even David Lynch has enjoyed a comparable run. A rhapsodic movie directed…

Huffing and puffing to resuscitate a long-moribund genre, James Mangold manages to imbue a fifty-year-old Western with the semblance of life. Mangold’s remake of 3:10 to Yuma isn’t as startling a resurrection job as his Johnny Cash biopic, but it does send a saddlebag full of Western tropes skittering into…

No less than Spider-Man 3, Oren Rudavsky’s The Treatment is an urban fairy tale. It’s an Upper-West-Side story, adapted from publishing powerhouse Daniel Menaker’s well-reviewed 1998 novel, first published in the New Yorker, in which a smart-mouthed, if diffident, hero (Chris Eigeman) wins a wise, beautiful princess (the versatile, sometime…

Nothing if not appropriate for summer blockbuster season, Werner Herzog’s latest feature, based on his 1997 documentary Little Dieter Needs to Fly, offers a suitably fantastic tale of war, freedom and fortitude, set in the jungles of Indochina and featuring an immigrant lad who turns out to be just as…

We’re Americans. We go into other countries when we need to. It’s tricky, but it works.” So declares Michael Moore in the midst of his new documentary, Sicko. Moore could be riffing on the war in Iraq, to name only our most recent intervention, but he’s actually referring to U.S…

A skilled actor vanishes into a role; a movie star appropriates it. As presence trumps character, the star personifies Brecht’s alienation effect and the movie becomes a vehicle — the latest installment in an ongoing career or, in the case of a great star, a public myth. Angelina Jolie is…

So lame it’s…cool? Nancy Drew, writer-director Andrew Fleming’s attempt to jump-start a new Warner Bros. franchise, is a movie flaunting a most obvious demographic strategy: a teen flick with a sensibility, or at least a sense of humor, that’s most definitely parental. Invented in 1930 by the same Stratemeyer syndicate…

Uplifted beyond its merits by a stunning performance from Marion Cotillard, the humdrum biopic of Edith Piaf, La Vie en Rose, jogs obligingly along with Piaf the legend rather than Piaf the woman. It’s not hard to do, given the fuzzy borders between Piaf’s undeniably scarred life and her relentless…

Afrail-looking young woman, outfitted with a bomb, wanders through Times Square — finger on the switch, searching for the moment to blow up. That, in a sentence, is the premise of Julia Loktev’s outrageously abstract Day Night Day Night. Terror is existential in this highly intelligent, somewhat sadistic, totally fascinating…

Lowest Common Denominatorism writ large and engraved in stone like the Ten Commandments according to Cecil B. DeMille, the Hollywood blockbuster is often an allegory for itself. Walt Disney, the notoriously litigious studio that successfully changed the nation’s copyright laws to protect its trademark Mickey Mouse but more recently declared…

Cannes, France — Sometimes the competition is actually competitive. No one disputes that the official section at the 60th Cannes Film Festival has been the strongest in recent memory. The heavy favorites are the Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men; Julian Schnabel’s surprisingly restrained and bizarrely chic French-language adaptation…

Cannes, France — The 60th Cannes Film Festival was a generous one — and so was its jury, bestowing the Palme d’Or on the least heralded, most critically acclaimed movie in an unusually strong competition, namely Romanian director Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. Mungiu’s skillfully directed,…

CANNES, France—The world’s preeminent film festival celebrated its 60th birthday party — the opening banquet catered by the world’s hippest, or is that once-hippest? — filmmaker. Hardly the disaster many feared, but far from the triumph others anticipated, Wong Kar-wai’s first English-language feature, My Blueberry Nights — starring Norah Jones…

Mystery man of the long-ago Australian new wave, Ray Lawrence has evidently grown less finicky. Lawrence, now 59, made his feature debut with the phantasmagoric Bliss, famous flop of the 1985 Cannes Film Festival; he then licked his wounds and directed TV commercials for sixteen years before reappearing with somewhat…

Jafar Panahi is a paradoxical populist. He makes crowd-pleasing art movies, often set in the midst of life — the urban crowd is one of his subjects — and is a virtuoso director of (non) actors. On the other hand, this most widely seen of Iranian filmmakers is also the…

Holland’s gift to world cinema, Paul Verhoeven can be a very bad boy and a very good filmmaker. Any of his movies could have been titled Basic Instinct — not least his epic World War II thriller Black Book, in which a Jewish chanteuse who has watched her family massacred…

There are first films like Citizen Kane or Breathless, which, as radically new and fully achieved as they are, unfairly overshadow an entire oeuvre. And then there are first films, perhaps even more radical, which haunt an artist’s career not through precocious virtuosity, but because they have an innocence that…

No director works closer to his unconscious than David Lynch, and, stimulated by the use of amateur digital-video technology, his latest feature ventures as far inland as this blandly enigmatic filmmaker has ever gone. A movie about Lynch’s obsessions, Inland Empire is largely a meditation on the power of recording:…

Alberto Lattuada’s tricky-to-parse Mafioso dates from 1962, but with its abrupt tonal shifts and disturbing existential premise, the nearly forgotten dark comedy could be the most modern (or at least modernist) movie in town. Released by Rialto on the heels of its triumphantly rediscovered Army of Shadows, Lattuada’s tale of…

Gross-out horror is never far from comedy, and The Host, Bong Joon-ho’s giddy creature feature, has an anarchic mess factor worthy of a pile of old Mad magazines. A broadly played clown show full of lowbrow antics, Bong’s big splat is itself a sort of monster — the top-grossing movie…