The story is simple enough: Sometime during the dying days of the Tang Dynasty in China, though it could really be any time and any place, two cops named Leo (Andy Lau) and Jin (Takeshi Kaneshiro) sit in a station house drinking tea. They decide that one of them will…

In Spanglish, which is less a story than a snapshot of a crumbling marriage populated by sitcom characters, Adam Sandler plays John Clasky, an average man with an above-average life. With his burgeoning double chin always covered in a slight shadow of stubble, he’s a celebrated chef who runs his…

As the year stumbles toward its conclusion and critics begin penning their best-and-worst compendiums, here’s a holiday contender fit for the all-time Naughty List. Based on the John Grisham novel Skipping Christmas — which, face it, is less a novel than an impulse item stacked on bookstore checkout counters –…

Jerry Bruckheimer has always insisted that he cares less about critical acclaim than commercial appeal. “We make movies for the common man,” he said almost three years ago, as Black Hawk Down was crash-landing in theaters. “The pictures that I’ve made over the last twenty years or so have been…

The most shocking thing about Kinsey, the first film from writer-director Bill Condon since 1998’s Gods and Monsters, is how shocking it actually is. Within the confines of a standard biopic (A Beautiful Dirty Mind, you might call it), Condon refuses to play it straight — which is only appropriate,…

A week after having seen Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, no memory of it remains except for some scribblings in my notepad — such is the slight nature of this woeful, forgettable sequel. Squandering the goodwill that lingers from the original — now a beloved relic among the singletons…

Writer-director Charles Shyer’s Alfie is less a remake of the 1966 film that made Michael Caine a star than it is a retooling that softens the horrific blows struck by the original; it’s sweeter, too, cotton candy spun from decades-old arsenic. The original, written by Bill Naughton (who also penned…

It would be so easy to titter and scoff at Shall We Dance?, a Miramaxed-out version of the 1996 Japanese film of the same name, which told of a bored businessman who is reinvigorated after a few dozen dance lessons. This version, with its cast of glow-in-the-dark movie stars and…

Maybe it’s the mark of a great film that it can affect an audience member even when he sleeps through the entire thing. Such was the case with my father at a recent preview of David O. Russell’s I ♥ Huckabees, a philosophy lecture masquerading as a comedy, in which…

There are at least three movies contained within the covers of H.G. Bissinger’s best-selling 1990 non-fiction book Friday Night Lights. One is concerned with the socioeconomic life of a small West Texas town built on the wobbly foundations of oil and racism and the out-of-whack worship of a high school…

Shark Tale is an animated film, though after you see it you might wonder whether the term is intended as oxymoronic. Put simply, it has no life in it at all. Not even the kids roped into an afternoon preview screening seemed terribly interested. Perhaps they’ve grown tired of computer-made…

Mr. 3000 has low aspirations, which suits it well. It’s about a 47-year-old baseball player trying to get three meager hits and the team for which he plays trying to climb out of fifth place and into third by the season’s rapidly approaching end. Not much to root for, is…

A good friend likes to say that there’s only one kind of great pop song: the song that someone had to create, as though the writer and performer had no choice. The song can be corny or cynical, upbeat or downhearted — it doesn’t matter. All that counts is that…

Jonathan Demme’s gutsy The Manchurian Candidate, which dares to rear its head just as the Democratic National Convention convenes in Boston, is the anti-Bush-administration movie for those who refuse to see Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 or Robert Greenwald’s Outfoxed because, well, they just ain’t Right. It’s less a remake of…

Is this one of those avant-garde things?” a dying Cole Porter (Kevin Kline) warily asks Gabe (Jonathan Pryce), a sort of Ghost of Musicals Past who appears out of the ether to shepherd the composer through the this-was-your-life montage that makes up Irvin Winkler’s biopic De-Lovely. “It’s a musical –…

Anchorman, co-written by its star, Will Ferrell, plays like a series of outtakes strung together more or less in a random sequence. There’s a vague plot, about the fall and rise of a San Diego newsman whose polyester suits are brighter than he is, but this doesn’t propel the movie…

Perhaps some day in the distant future, film scholars and academics concerned with race relations will devote papers and lectures and even entire books to Keenen Ivory Wayans’s White Chicks, in which two FBI agents, played by Shawn and Marlon Wayans, don Caucasian masks and impersonate white women in order…

Jehane Noujaim co-directed 2001’s remarkable Startup.com, about two Internet whiz kids who brokered just enough big deals to wind up with broken dreams, and the audience came away understanding how it felt to invest everything in something eventually worth nothing. The headlines of five years ago came to bittersweet life…

All you need to know about Spider-Man 2 is revealed in the opening credits, in which comic-book artist Alex Ross recaps the 2002 original in loving, lavishly painted panels. Spidey and Mary Jane Watson are once again entangled in that now-iconic upside-down kiss; nutty Norman Osborn, out of Green Goblin…

You might think that with the technological advances in moviemaking since 1956, this new version of Around the World in 80 Days would at least look better than its predecessor did. You could not be faulted for believing you’d be wowed by the Rube Goldberg gadgets of inventor Phileas Fogg,…

The real Melvin Van Peebles shows up just once in Baadasssss!, a fictionalized account of his making of Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song in 1971, and it’s at the film’s end; he sits silent, grinning, clutching his ever-present cigar. But he’s all over this movie, in which his son Mario plays…

Sitting through Raising Helen is an exercise in frustration, because somewhere inside this big heap of Hollywood nothing is a something (someone, actually) worth saving and savoring. Her name is Joan Cusack, always a supporting player but never a star, no matter her grace and warmth and charm even in…