It won’t ruin anyone’s experience of 3-Iron, the new film by Korean writer/director Kim Ki-duk, to reveal that it closes with a single epigraph: “It’s hard to tell that the world we live in is either reality or a dream.” Presumably, the correct translation would replace “that” with “whether”; even…

It seems unlikely that any American outside of a cloistered, sports-averse, PBS-watching film reviewer would have failed to notice the 2002 arrival of Yao Ming, the 7’6″ gentle giant also known as China’s national basketball hero and, in the U.S., the number-one pick in the NBA draft — especially since,…

Amanda Peet. Ashton Kutcher. Romantic comedy. Who’d have thought it could work? And yet A Lot Like Love is an entertainment success, a triple threat of fresh writing, inspired directing and, yes, good acting. Fortified with a healthy dose of intelligence, it manages to leap clear across an entire field…

Does the world really need a new film from Woody Allen every single year? Yes, he is one of America’s great auteurs. Yes, he’s responsible for some very fine movies, many of them comedies (Annie Hall), several of them tragedies (Crimes and Misdemeanors, Another Woman), and some hovering in that…

It’s not easy to pull off a good morality tale. Too often, movies with a message, or about a movement, reduce characters and events to type. They pit unqualified good against unqualified evil — a dark-narrative temptation — and, like so much of what issues from Hollywood, do so to…

It’s hard to know what to expect from Wayne Wang. The Hong Kong-raised director has made one gorgeous mood movie (Chinese Box) and two intelligent literary adaptations (Smoke and Anywhere but Here); he was also responsible, in his early days, for the overwrought sob-fest The Joy Luck Club. Then, in…

Toward the end of Born Into Brothels, a superb and piercing documentary by directors Zana Briski and Ross Kauffman, a twelve-year-old child examines a photograph. It’s beautiful, he says, because it shows us how its subjects live. Yes, they’re very poor, and the shot is hard to look at because…

When was the last time you lost yourself in a Shakespeare film? It’s a testament to the success of William Shakespeare¹s The Merchant of Venice, the sharp and brooding new version directed by Michael Radford (Il Postino), that we leave the theater without concern for the production. Instead, the response…

The Sea Inside, the new right-to-die drama from Spanish director Alejandro Amen´bar (The Others), is a flawed film that’s worth seeing. Based on Letters From Hell, a book by quadriplegic Ramón Sampedro about his thirty-year quest to kill himself, the movie favors the emotional over the legal, centering on Sampedro’s…

In her first stab at narrative drama, writer-director Shainee Gabel has managed to assemble a superstar cast and a seasoned technical team. She spent five years on the project, adapting an unpublished novel written by the father of a friend, working with a clarity of vision and an admirable goal:…

When did we first encounter a feel-good film that united delinquent kids, a devoted (if professionally frustrated) teacher and the transformative power of music? Was it with Julie Andrews? Could it have been the spirited, soft-hearted Maria and her Austrian brood, trilling their way up the hills above the abbey?…

The promos read: “24 hours. 350 miles. His girlfriend’s kids. What could possibly go wrong?” In the case of Are We There Yet?, here’s the short answer: a flaccid screenplay; bratty kids stripped of depth and personality; a single joke replayed in every scene; unearned attempts at sentiment; and a…

While Michael Moore and Mel Gibson garnered most of this year’s critical attention, plenty of fine films opened to little or no fanfare. Following are our reviewers’ favorite movies that didn’t draw the adulation they deserved. Consider yourself armed for the next trip to Blockbuster. Control Room. In a year…

The Gospel According to Mel Who needs studio publicists when every fundamentalist pastor in the country is herding his flock to the multiplex? Why waste good money on TV spots when the Vatican is handing out rave reviews? No doubt about it, Thomas, Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ…

Our best movies of the year may actually have been anything but the best to a few of our critics: Such is the dilemma of offering employment to writers of dissenting opinion. In other words, the No. 1 film of 2004 wasn’t universally heralded by our team of Bill Gallo,…

How does Mike Leigh do it? The years pass; film fashions come and go; Hollywood churns its commercial pap. Careers sparkle; others fizz; whom the gods would destroy, they first make famous. Meanwhile, over in England, Leigh makes his films, tracking the intricacies of the lower-class family with the patience…

The very best thing about A Dirty Shame, a giddy sex farce from John Waters, is the credits. What’s not to love about a list of characters that includes “Sylvia Stickles,” “Marge the Neuter,” “Fat Fuck Frank,” “Cow Patty” and “Tire Lick Boy”? The soundtrack, too, bears comic fruit, with…

In Victorian England, thousands of novels were published every year. Of the few that have endured, perhaps none is more worthy of a film adaptation than Vanity Fair, if for no other reason than this: It’s a chore to read. Clocking in at 850 pages, with frequent excursions into unrelated…

Near the beginning of The Corporation, a damning documentary designed to expose everything that is irresponsible, immoral, inhumane and lethal about corporations, the narrator posits the film’s thesis: “We present the corporation as a paradox,” she says, “an institution that creates great wealth but causes enormous and often hidden harm.”…

It’s charming. It’s hilarious. It is perhaps the most beautifully crafted, lovingly rendered portrait of extreme geekitude ever to grace the screen. It’s Napoleon Dynamite — the first feature film from 24-year-old Brigham Young University student Jared Hess — and, if there is any justice, it’s going to be huge…

Beware the exclamation point. When found at the end of a title, it almost inevitably signals a level of self-hype rarely justified by the content of whatever it hopes to name. In the case of the movie Saved! — an amusing if facile comedy about a good Christian girl gone…

Ah, the peculiar genius that is Guy Maddin. Who else but the morose Canadian director, born and raised in one of the coldest cities in the world, would marry silent film, 1930s movie musicals, Prohibition, family melodrama, monster-movie gore and a critique of capitalist zeal in a surreal montage about…