Section Film

Les Vues Film Series presents ‘My Louisiana Love’

Vermilionville’s free monthly cultural film series, Les Vues, returns the last Monday of each month at 6:30 p.m. in the Performance Center. November's screening will be curated by Monique Michelle Verdin, who will be showing her film, My Louisiana Love.

Cane Fire Film Series presents ’Zero Days’

Zero Days is the most comprehensive accounting to date of how a clandestine mission hatched by two allies with clashing agendas forever opened the Pandora’s Box of cyberwarfare.

Cane Fire Film Series presents ‘Raiders’

The Cane Fire Film Series presents Raiders!: The Story of the Greatest Fan Film Ever Made, on Monday, July 11, at 7:30 p.m. at the Acadiana Center for the Arts, located at 101 W. Vermilion St., in Downtown Lafayette.

Wrong side of the Reich

Lafayette prof’s biographical film explores late Lafayette resident’s brush with world history.

Casting call in the Southern Wild

Production team behind 2012 Oscar favorite Beasts of the Southern Wild is scouring Lafayette for a pair of actors in the raw.

Yes, we Cannes

The 11th annual Cinema on the Bayou is just days away.

How do you say Forked Island?

Filmmaker Nicholas Campbell looks to explore cultural division in Louisiana's not-so-distant past through a dramatic series currently vying for a grant.

Crazy Poets

Lafayette natives stake out turf in filmmaking from their base in Austin. Brothers/filmmakers Josh Holden, 29, and Nick Holden, 30, split their childhood between growing up in Lafayette and hanging...

Crazy Poets

Lafayette natives stake out turf in filmmaking from their base in Austin. Brothers/filmmakers Josh Holden, 29, and Nick Holden, 30, split their childhood between growing up in Lafayette and hanging...

Cinema on the Bayou Returns

Award-winning Acadiana filmmaker extraordinaire Pat Mire's Cinema on the Bayou Film Festival returns Jan 23-27 for an eighth annual go-round with dozens of documentary and narrative feature films from...

Read and Weep

Director Stephen Daldry's simple, stunning film The Reader is an amazing exploration of guilt, memory and unanswered questions. The ill-fated affair of Hannah Schmitz (Kate Winslet) and Michael Berg...

Like a Good Neighbor

Director Clint Eastwood turns his slow and steady eye toward the microcosm of a Michigan neighborhood in Gran Torino. Grumpy old man Walt Kowalski (Clint Eastwood) finds himself involved against his...

Sinking Spirit

Frank Miller’s directorial debut is all caricature and no comic book. How can The Spirit (Gabriel Macht) save Central City when he's one superhero that can't even save his own movie? If superheroes...

The Benefits of Doubt

John Patrick Shanley brings his Pulitzer Prize-winning play to the big screen with some success. Twisted sister? School principal Aloysius (Meryl Streep) confronts her parish priest with serious...

My Space

An alien arrives with an extreme idea of course correction in Scott Derrickson's unnecessary but entertaining remake of The Day Earth Stood Still. Klaatu (Keanu Reeves) presides over The Day the...

Nobel Piece

Writer/director Randall Miller makes a quirky mess out of kidnapping, cannibalism and family dysfunction in Nobel Son. Performance poetess City Hall (Eliza Dushku) and anthropology doctoral student...

Drive Time

Transporter 3 delivers fast and fun escapist entertainment. Strangers on a train: Good guy Frank Martin (Jason Statham) and bad guy Johnson (Robert Knepper) have a close encounter. Transporter 3 is...

Rock 'N' Role

An unlikely duo produces unlikely laughs in Role Models. Coworkers Wheeler (Seann William Scott) and Danny (Paul Rudd) find court-ordered comedy in Role Models. Silly will always survive. The...

Death, Love and Dentistry

Ghost Town is a sweet, silly — and decidedly not stupid — romantic comedy. Three’s a crowd: Bertram Pincus (Ricky Gervais) woos the widow (Tea Leoni) of the ghost who is haunting him (Greg Kinnear)...

Turn Before Seeing

The Coen Brothers should have taken their own advice with Burn After Reading. CIA operative Osborne Cox (John Malkovich) presides over the non-intelligence community of Burn After Reading. The best...

Most Dangerous Game

Traitor goes deep inside the war on terror. The light from the blaze flickers in the eyes of the young boy. Just a breath ago, the merciless Middle Eastern sun was the brightest fire in his world. His...

We Weren't Soldiers

An action comedy sends up action-adventure war movies, an Oscar nominee sends up Oscar-nominated actors, and instead of having a breakdown, Tom Cruise breaks it down in Tropic Thunder. Actors Tugg...

Mock the Vote

There’s a point to Swing Vote that’s well taken but not delivered well. Bud (Kevin Costner) and Molly (Madeline Carroll) determine the outcome of a presidential election in Swing Vote. One man, one...

Misplaced Faith

Director Chris Carter rallies the troops for another big-screen X-Files episode that’s low on fanfare — and fan fare. Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) rejoin the FBI to...

In Love With Knight

In The Dark Knight, Christopher Nolan brings back Batman with daring, depth and a rare understanding of the psychology of the character and his world. The late Heath Ledger mesmerizes as the Joker in...

Hell Hath No Fury

The Hellboy sequel boasts fanciful and fascinating new creatures — but not much character. Sidelined in his own sequel, Hellboy (Ron Perlman) fights to prevent a war between worlds. A towering,...

A Tangled Web

An ancient guild of weavers becomes a fate-wielding fraternity of assassins in Wanted. Fox (Angelina Jolie) makes Wesley (James McAvoy) a Wanted man. Wesley Gibson wants a lot. Mostly, he wants...

Popular Mechanics

Pixar does the robot with WALL-E. Like works of art, machines are not alive. Appliances, gadgets and tools only contain as much heart, or the appearance thereof, as human beings put into them. Lonely...

Guru Gone Wrong

First-rate funny man Mike Myers plays a second-rate holy man in The Love Guru. Guru Pitka (Mike Myers) falters on his own five-step path to enlightenment in The Love Guru. Only in the messy mind of...

Natural Causes

An unseen killer stalks residents of the Northeast in the sporadically creepy The Happening. Philadelphians Elliot Moore (Mark Wahlberg), his wife Alma (Zooey Deschanel) and their young friend Jess...

Antics Semitic

Man-boy Adam Sandler makes sweet and stupid slapstick as an Israeli-super-soldier-turned-hairdresser in You Don’t Mess With the Zohan. Army man Zohan (Adam Sandler) lands in New York with a dream: to...

Bad Company

The Strangers is a terrifyingly simple horror story — with a terrible ending. Someone’s in the kitchen with Kristen (and in the bedroom and in the living room) in The Strangers. Something bad has...

No, Speed Racer, No!

Though it features a talented cast, Speed Racer is acid on the eyes. It’s a sad state of affairs when the best thing about a film is outtake footage of a chimp playing during the closing...

The Indy Film Scene

The old whip still cracks in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Perhaps the defining moment of Indiana Jones lore is the fight that didn’t happen. In Raiders of the Lost Ark, a chase...

Below the Belt

David Mamet gives kung fu films a kick. Playwright and filmmaker David Mamet holds a purple belt in jujitsu, which you might not guess from his work. Jujitsu involves deflecting the strength of your...

Iron Works

Iron Man blows open the summer movie season with great casting and an origin story told with extreme originality. If Tony Stark’s livelihood has been weapons of mass destruction, his personal life has...

One Bad Mama

Pregnancy comedy Baby Mama grates expectations for 30 Rock star and Saturday Night Live alum Tina Fey. Whenever people star in their own American Express commercials, they’re not just selling credit...

Breakup Island

The man behind Superbad and Knocked Up turns out more riotous comedy with Forgetting Sarah Marshall. The Judd Apatow comedy train has gone off the rails a few times recently. After producing last...

Bring on the Funk

Smart People makes sweet, sad eyes at a family in quiet crisis. The smartest person at the Wetherhold dining room table isn’t an immediately obvious choice. Dad Lawrence (Dennis Quaid) is a tenured...

Bright Light

Legendary director Martin Scorsese turns his cameras on The Rolling Stones. Long after Jean-Luc Godard (One Plus One/Sympathy for the Devil) and Albert Maysles (Gimme Shelter), one of the great...

Pocket Full of Kryptonite

Superhero Movie isn’t funny because it’s stupid, and it’s stupid because it isn’t funny. A few weeks ago, film critic and cultural crank Joe Queenan held forth in the pages of The Guardian on a topic...

Negative Reaction

A remake of the Thai photo thriller Shutter scares up a few creepy moments, but this is one picture that’s not worth very many words. Ben Shaw (Joshua Jackson) almost has a picture-perfect life. He’s...

Battle of the Boleyns

History loses its head in director Justin Chadwick’s fun but almost entirely fictional The Other Boleyn Girl. Before the purifying fire and fury of the Virgin Queen, there was the cool cunning of Anne...

The Baker Street Irregulars

A ragtag group of friends and small-time felons do the British government’s dirty work in The Bank Job. The twists and turns that make up the heist at the heart of The Bank Job are just about...

Pig Tale

Penelope misses out on being a perfectly charming princess fable — by a nose. The makers of Penelope, like some of its characters, don’t know how good they have it. Producer Reese Witherspoon and...

They Might Be Giants ...

... but a 3D concert-movie treatment makes U2 even larger than larger-than-life. In the very early ’80s, a transfer student showed up at a small Opelousas high school with a well-worn tape of this...

Leapin' Losers

Jumper loves its teleporting twentysomethings but leaves script and artful acting far behind. Don't tase me, bro: David Rice (Hayden Christensen) and unsuspecting gal pal Millie Harris (Rachel...

Killer Instinct

An ’80s pop-culture icon gets back in the fight in Rambo. Old soldiers like John Rambo never die. And this world of war we live in apparently will never even let them fade away. Twice now, the...

Blood Quest

In his latest attempt at epic movie-making, director Paul Thomas Anderson puts the bulk of the task on Daniel Day-Lewis' shoulders. Daniel Day-Lewis, one of the most physically gifted actors of his...

When Monsters Attack!

Cloverfield is thrilling, but proceed with caution if you’re prone to motion sickness. A nasty beast kicks the daylights out of Manhattan in Cloverfield, an exciting take on the tired monster-movie...

Runner-Up

In 27 Dresses’ familiar plot, Katherine Heigl wonders why she hasn’t made it to the altar. Jane dwells in a female sanctuary of baby’s breath and pink tulle. Packed with a bounty of sherbet-colored...

Down on the Bayou

Little Chenier is always as visually beautiful - and sometimes just as slow-moving - as the many muddy waters that crisscross south Louisiana. Little brother Pemon (Fred Koehler) is cared for by...

Pregnant, With Possibilities

First-time screenwriter Diablo Cody and director Jason Reitman deliver a sweet, if self-consciously smart, Juno. Adoptive parents Vanessa (Jennifer Garner) and Mark Loring (Jason Bateman) don't quite...

Lawyers, Guns and Money

Charlie Wilson's War shows how the West won the battle, lost the peace and found itself in a whole different kind of fight. Charlie Wilson's War is the kind of movie that really gets called smart...

Slice of Life

Tim Burton's Sweeney Todd hits razor-sharp notes. Early in Stephen Sondheim's musical Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, before the blood starts flowing in earnest, a tormented-looking...

Last Man Standing

Will Smith roams post-apocalyptic New York City in I Am Legend. In I Am Legend's astonishing vision of New York City in three years, waist-high grass grows through pavement cracks in Times Square....

Lots of Heart

Don't listen to all the cranky critics ' medical thriller Awake isn't half the disaster it's made out to be. Awake, the latest film to sneak into theaters courtesy of the Weinstein brothers, is...

Cliché Attack

The Mist is clouded by a horrendous performance from Marcia Gay Harden. When the first sign of trouble in the new adaptation of Stephen King's The Mist appears, it gets scary fast. After a storm...

Past Forward

Robert Zemeckis, Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary employ cutting-edge technology to re-imagine the oldest tale in the English-language written tradition. Shimmering in the false light of enchanted golden...

The Sheep of State

Lions for Lambs takes to task the unengaged and the ineffectual for the many failures in the war on terror. America is an unfinished social studies project. We tend to think about America only as...

Crime and Punishment

Ridley Scott's American Gangster chronicles the real-life rise and fall of heroin-kingpin Frank Lucas. From the outside looking in, it would be understandable to initially confuse American Gangster's...

Incredible Journey

Sean Penn and Emile Hirsch create a masterpiece with Into the Wild. Sean Penn makes the leap from good director to master filmmaker with Into the Wild, a tremendously moving, beautifully acted film...

Night Moves

Family loyalty is tested in director James Gray's gritty character study, We Own the Night. The prodigal son has to face the music and help the family in We Own the Night, a nice showcase for the...

Lost and Found

Debuting director Ben Affleck's movie is Gone Baby Gone, but his career is back and on an exhilarating new track. Witness the rebirth of Ben Affleck. Somehow, in the decade since the surprise success...

Brother Act

Almost a decade after There's Something About Mary, the Farrelly Brothers try and reclaim the raunch crown. It's been seven years since the Farrelly brothers made their last R-rated raunchy comedy,...

Kingdom Come

American FBI agents take on a bomber cell in The Kingdom, as director Peter Berg tackles the war on terror. Director Peter Berg signals early on that he intends The Kingdom to be something more than...

In the Shadow of the Valley

Writer/director Paul Haggis walks with the wounded In the Valley of Elah. Bodies are not the only things broken in war. Human forms are maimed and destroyed in thousands of battle's terrible ways,...

The Others

The explosive violence of London's Russian-mafia underworld cuts to the heart of director David Cronenberg-s interesting - if ultimately unfulfilled - Eastern Promises. On the dark, rain-slicked...

Violent Femme

The Brave One is a movie that doesn't make enough sense about a world that doesn't make any. There is a seed of a smart movie buried somewhere inside The Brave One, fighting for the surface and...

Western Union

A pair of inspired performances from Russell Crowe and Christian Bale make 3:10 to Yuma worth catching. The flicker of firelight plays off the drawn faces of a handful of weary, wary men. Out in the...

Home Alone

A new adaptation of catty novel The Nanny Diaries isn't as bad as you've heard. Well, here we are staring down the end of summer. It's a time when the temperatures start to diminish, the kids go back...

What Is It Good For?

War delivers the occasional moment of stupid summer fun. Other than that, it's good for absolutely nothing. War isn't quite the clash of the titans one would expect from a smash-up summer movie...

McLovin' It

Superbad is one trashy, mundane, twisted and oh-so-funny high-school flick. We are getting some good hardcore laughs this summer. First, Judd Apatow directed Knocked Up with Seth Rogen, and now we...

To Catch a Fallen Star

The lightest of summer fare, Stardust glimmers with a frothy mixture of fantasy and fun. The summer fairy-tale film Stardust begins in a town intent on keeping its citizens at home. But for a sleepy...

Busy Being Bourne

The taut Bourne Ultimatum brings the breathless trilogy to a crashing close. The Bourne film trilogy is one lean, mean movie machine. Rarely has any single action film received the plaudits and...

Too Much of a Once-Good Thing

The Simpsons stopped being special seasons and seasons ago. The movie never starts. The Simpsons is smart satire. The Simpsons is laugh-out-loud funny. The Simpsons is the greatest television show of...

Secrets and Lives

An Academy Award-winning German film examines the personal, the political and The Lives of Others. The Lives of Others is a tale of three cities, and all of them are Berlin. Set in the storied German...

Dry Spells

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is the most grown-up film of the series so far ' if by grown-up, you mean flat-out boring. Harry Potter movies should not have pacing problems. J.K. Rowling...

Chef Special

In Ratatouille, Pixar serves up a picture-perfect tale of heart-friendly haute cuisine. Simple things done well can be spectacular works of art. Less-than-ideal messengers can end up delivering the...

Hard Times

He may have cleaned up his language, but Bruce Willis is still blowing things up in the new franchise installment Live Free or Die Hard. Die Hard fans have every right to be skeptical about the...

Evan Essence

A freshman congressman out to change the world gets swept away by Someone Else's master building plan in the family-friendly modern-day Noah tale Evan Almighty. Convenient sequel-naming conventions...

Four Better? Four Worse

Special effects can't make up for Silver Surfer's flat chemistry and dull denouement. Invisibility girl, flying fire guy, Stretchy Stretcherson, indestructible orange dude. The Fantastic Four movies...

From Hysterical to Horrifying

Knocked Up and Mr. Brooks offer opposite ends of the summer movie-going experience. Judd Apatow likes impolite conversations. He builds his movies around them. The 2005 smash hit The 40-Year-Old...

The Sparrow and the Swann

A quirky love of language and substantial sense of fun bring Captain Jack ' and the entire Pirates trilogy ' back to life. There are moments when Captain Jack Sparrow seems like a comedic character...

A Distant Third

The latest Shrek film finds the charm and intelligence of its original incarnation Far, Far Away. The underlying ethic of Shrek the Third is the oft-repeated idea that just because someone treats you...

Mob Zombie

The rage virus is contained, but 28 Weeks Later, it rises to kill again. The infection, once passed on, is instantaneous and uncontrollable. There are no death throes, no time-lapse transformations....

Web of Whys

Director Sam Raimi's attempt to showcase the softer side of Spiderman is a wonder. As in, wonder what he could have been thinking. In the third installment of his summer-blockbuster franchise,...

It Takes a Village

The funny guys behind the zombie comedy Shaun of the Dead take on buddy-cop movies in Hot Fuzz. Sandford is a perfect postcard of a place. Rolling English countryside on all sides, quaint village...

L.A. Law and Order

If Fracture is the new standard, then television lawyer shows just may have ruined the big screen for barristers. For a young up-and-comer who just scored a big-league junior associate job at one of...

Back to the Grind

Half flawed, half fabulous, Grindhouse brings B-movies back to the A-list. Audacity is an underrated artistic virtue. Of all the elements easily referenced in the volatile chemical cocktail known as...

Ice, Ice, Baby

Comedy gold medalists Will Ferrell and Jon Heder pair up for figure-skating spoof Blades of Glory. Stupid humor works best when it's based on something smart. Will Ferrell knows this in his crazy...

Messy Message

Two different Adam Sandlers and a flimsy script doom Reign Over Me. Reign Over Me is a strange, confused, embarrassing and uncomfortable movie. Granted, the character Adam Sandler plays is supposed...

Days and Confused

Premonition provides a perfect example of the pitfalls of time-traveling, alternate-universe movie-making. Linda Hanson (Sandra Bullock) lives a quite perfect life of quite quiet desperation....

Go Tell the Spartans

Outnumbered fighters exchange life for legend in the narrow pass of Thermopylae in director Zack Snyder's 300. The triumph of Thermopylae lies in its tragedy. Or, one should say, in its tragedy and...

Stop Sign

Director David Fincher drains the life out of the story of the serial killer named Zodiac. The killer who called himself Zodiac may have stopped writing his infamous letters in 1978, but filmgoers...

Weight Pain

Eddie Murphy's comedic talent gets swallowed up in Norbit. If you're an Eddie Murphy fan, and you have a big smile on your face because he's experiencing some sort of career resurgence with his Oscar...

A Day at the Breach

Director Billy Ray tackles a true-to-life tale of every-day espionage and exceptional deception in Breach. When Eric O'Neill reports for his first day of work in his newest assignment, there are one...

An Honor Just to Be Nominated

In a year where there were too many solid films and performances vying for too few Oscar spots, an old cliché finds new meaning. It cannot be easy to be Oscar. No matter what you do, someone (maybe...

Hannibal the Cannibalized

Silence of the Lambs creator Thomas Harris just can't help going back for seconds (and thirds and fourths). There's something darkly delicious about the fact that Hollywood and novelist Thomas Harris...

An American Werewolf in Bucharest

Fans howl as Hollywood takes a big bite out of popular werewolf teen-novel Blood and Chocolate. Somewhere Hermann Hesse must be bearing his teeth and snarling. The revered German poet and novelist...

Highway to Hell

Even the sketchiest sense of character development takes a back seat in the bland, bloody remake of The Hitcher. It stands to reason that if Hollywood has the hubris to try to remake a classic like...

The Kids Are Not All Right

Nick Cassavetes' cautionary Alpha Dog explores how bad choices and parental negligence had deadly consequences for a group of lost boys in southern California. Despite entire atmospheres of hot-air...

Frightening Future

The human race faces extinction in Children of Men. Civilization is in the throes of endgame with director Alfonso Cuarón's Children of Men, an unrelenting and bleak outlook regarding future times....

All Fight Long

Rocky Balboa is back in the ring to take another swing. All Rocky Balboa wanted to do was go the distance. By the end of the now-iconic, John Avildsen-directed 1976 film that introduced American...

Shepherd Spy

Robert DeNiro's The Good Shepherd contains as many complexities as the shadowy government agency it seeks to illuminate. No matter what yesteryear's catchy movie title says, spies are never like us....

Life, Liberty and ... Luck?

A person could consider The Pursuit of Happyness the ultimate American success story. A person could miss one of the film's larger points. Exiting a full theater after an afternoon screening of The...

Apocalypse Always

In the mesmerizing Apocalypto, director Mel Gibson turns his heaping heart of darkness toward the fall of an ancient civilization ' with all its overtones for our time. The end is always near. Not...

Acting Jewel

Leonardo DiCaprio turns in an Oscar-caliber performance in the action thriller Blood Diamond. This holiday season brings us a movie with a really big diamond, disastrous surroundings and Leonardo...

Buzz Kill

Director Christopher Guest's latest satire, For Your Consideration, deftly skewers the hype of Hollywood's award shows. There's a moment in For Your Consideration, during a spoof of movie critics to...

Band Camp

Jack Black and Kyle Gass aim for rock supremacy in Tenacious D: The Pick of Destiny. The self-anointed "Greatest Band In the World" gets its own movie with Tenacious D: The Pick of Destiny,...

What Gets Lost in Translation

Director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's Babel is a poignant reminder that the things dividing the human race are not nearly as powerful as all that unites us. For a film whose title labors under...

Stranger in a Strange Land

Comic troublemaker Sacha Baron Cohen unleashes his brilliant, bumbling Borat on the big screen to mixed results. Sacha Baron Cohen doesn't care what you think. It's probably not personal; he's just...

Light, But No Heat

A script crafted of good intentions ' and little else ' is the main reason that Catch a Fire never really does. The first time Patrick Chamusso catches his mother surreptitiously listening to Radio...

Uphill Battle

Director Clint Eastwood's Flags of Our Fathers attempts to show just how much gets lost, once truth is war's first casualty. Flags of Our Fathers opens with the hoarse voice of a grizzled veteran...

No Sleight Intended?

For a film layered with instances of elaborate one-upmanship and trickery, The Prestige's plot devices are puzzlingly transparent. There is a certain, well-documented honor among thieves, but if...

Crooks and Liars

The masterful Martin Scorsese rides a modern Hong Kong crime classic straight through the mean streets of Boston. With The Departed, living legend Martin Scorsese comes within about three seconds of...

Water World

In the Coast Guard movie The Guardian, unlikely pair Kevin Costner and Ashton Kutcher get along just swimmingly. In the good-guy glow of The Guardian, it's hard not to see Ashton Kutcher as the old...

Every Man a Pawn

No paean to populist politics, writer/director Steve Zaillian's All the King's Men is a stately, sad portrait of a power-hungry man. Power, not unlike war, is a force few in human history have ever...

Black Hole

Brian DePalma's The Black Dahlia wilts under the weight of a circuitous script and an ensemble's worth of bad acting. For years, films from Chinatown to L.A. Confidential have slipped beneath the...

A Star Is Worn

Life in Hollywoodland proved to be too much ' and not nearly enough ' for an actor named George Reeves. For a sad, unlucky few, the Hollywood Hills cast a silent shadow, dark and long. Not everyone...

Solar-Powered Success

A Sundance Film Festival favorite, Little Miss Sunshine beams with equal parts goodwill and good humor. Leo Tolstoy famously opened his elegant Anna Karenina with the following observation:...

Summer Camp

Snakes on a Plane is silly, slithery fun, a midnight movie classic in the making. A bad movie that knows it is a bad movie somehow becomes automatically better. Perhaps by embracing its own essential...

Capturing Katrina

Four documentaries remind the world that the Gulf Coast still needs help. Hard and precious lessons have been learned in the year since Hurricane Katrina. New Orleanians and their neighbors all...

Love Among the Ruins

Part requiem, part resurrection story, Oliver Stone's World Trade Center looks at loss and life through the prism of 9/11. The Romans gave history the phrase "Memento mori," in all its...

Undercover Brothers

With larger-than-life incarnations of Crockett and Tubbs and a stripped-down intensity, Miami Vice showcases director Michael Mann's many virtues. In a sea of skin and shadow, a silver-clad body...

In the Deep End

M. Night Shyamalan serves up another surprise with the exotic, lovely and bold Lady in the Water. Cleveland Heep is killing a bug. He is down on his knees, head under the kitchen sink, wildly...

Too-Close Encounter

Freeloading free spirit Owen Wilson strains the bonds of friendship when he moves in with his newlywed pals in You, Me and Dupree. You, Me and Dupree is not as stupid as it looks. Don't be fooled,...

Eye on the Sparrow

One summer's surprise pirate hit becomes another summer's surprise pirate miss. Argh. Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest jumps the shark with about 20 minutes to go. Truth be told, the...

Super Sighs

It's a bird! It's a plane! It's ... another mediocre Superman movie. If Superman is so great, why aren't his movies better? Seriously, Krypton's last son, this most superior of superheroes, is...

Remote Possibilities

In Click, Adam Sandler isn't careful what he wishes for and loses his control ' but not the control. Click is a little bit of channel-surfing for the soul. It's got something for just about everyone,...

Nacho Cheese

Dynamite writer/director Jared Hess delivers another visually innovative, endearing oddity. Napoleon Dynamite was the product of a sick, sublime mind. Two sick, sublime minds, to be exact ' the...

Deviled Ham

There's a fight between good and evil in The Omen's remake, but it has nothing to do with the spawn of Satan. There are moments when The Omen's remake is good, really quite good. But when it is bad,...

Love Is a Battlefield

Breaking up might be hard to do, but it can sometimes be fun to watch. Brooke and Gary are an odd couple. This is partially due to the fact that Brooke (Jennifer Aniston) seems to have slightly...

Lowered X-Pectations

Director Brett Ratner takes over the X-Men film franchise and delivers a big, dumb summer movie. X-men: The Last Stand only works if you don't want too much. Its one truly inventive cinematic...

Coming in From the Code

A crummy book has been made into a mediocre movie. Can we all move on now? There ought to be an 11th commandment dictating that badly written, bestselling books do not get to spark international...

Scared to Depths

Poseidon remains a ship adrift, despite delivering considerable upside-down, underwater thrills. Director Wolfgang Petersen always misses the boat. He must, or why else would he return to the sea...

See Cruise

Mission: Impossible III flunks the testosterone-action-flick test, but somehow its now-controversial star reminds us why we liked him in the first place. Can it be that while Tom Cruise has been...

Look Back in Anger

Director Paul Greengrass dares to revisit Sept. 11, attempting to recreate the fight for United 93. It's eerie to sit in a theater waiting for the lights to go down, knowing that what will follow...

Dreamz ... Zzzzz

What on earth did director and writer Paul Weitz eat to give him such awful American Dreamz? Now is the time for all good satirists to come to the aid of their country. Emphasis on the...

Lucky Charm

Director Paul McGuigan delivers visually witty, outside-the-lines fun with Lucky Number Slevin. Director Paul McGuigan's latest effort is what could be called a postmodern film noir. Mistaken...

Sink Like a Stone

All the buzz about the badness of Basic Instinct 2 forgets that the first installment wasn't exactly high art either. Sharon Stone was so much easier to defend in her Casino days. Someone as great as...

Inside Not-So-Straight

Director Spike Lee takes a typical bank heist tale and makes it as much about power and politics as any big-time payday. Spike Lee is the crazy street preacher of American cinema. Not even Oliver...

Playing Politics

The wild Wachowski brothers seem to miss the larger point of the legendary graphic novel V for Vendetta ' but still manage to provoke and entertain. Let's start with a couple of things that V for...

Sleazy Does It

Johnny Depp manages to make debauchery look depressing in director Laurence Dunmore's The Libertine. He warns us at the beginning, stepping out of the dark shadows to fling forward the words,...

Chappelle's Show

The boldest man in show business gets a few friends together for a raucous, righteous Block Party. Dave Chappelle is so darned likeable that his amiability extends to anyone within a 10-foot radius....

Match Less

Woody Allen's latest movie, Match Point, is good ' but it was great when it was Crimes and Misdemeanors. Tragedy plus time no longer equals only comedy; it now begins to neatly sum up Woody Allen's...

The Best ¦ and the Rest

Uncle Oscar is throwing a party, but only a chosen few will find themselves going home with favors. Roll out the red carpet; it's Oscar time. This year's round-up of nominated films offers robust...

Killer Comedy

In The Matador, Pierce Brosnan proves his worth is more than his Bond. Director Richard Stewart's The Matador is a strange slice of nothingness, a delightfully quirky little film that isn't really...

The Truman Show

First-time feature filmmaker Bennett Miller and first-time screenwriter Dan Futterman create a melancholy, malicious Capote. The most important thing you will almost not notice about Capote is how...

Naval Gazing

The makers of Annapolis can't decide which yesteryear melodrama they'd most like to remake. Annapolis is the best thing to happen to the 1980s since VH-1. When the ho-hum music network indulged in...

Talk About the Passion

Tristan and Isolde makes love look a whole lot like war. Tristan and Isolde isn't the worst movie ever made, and for director Kevin Reynolds, that's quite an accomplishment. Thanks to a monotone...

How Do I Love Thee?

Two current releases have Heath Ledger playing for both teams ' as a genre-busting gay cowboy in Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain and a legendary ladies' man in Lasse Hallstrom's Casanova. When a film...

A Time of Terror

Director Steven Spielberg returns to Munich for an intelligent, important exploration of the raging Arab-Israeli conflict. The roots of the ongoing Arab-Israeli conflict go back to the very...

The Show Must Go On (and On)

The Producers made the leap from classic film to classic Broadway musical. It doesn't quite make it back again. First a movie, then a musical. Now a movie musical. It's a recycling project worthy of...

Bad Memories

Rob Marshall's Memoirs of a Geisha is sometimes terribly beautiful ' and always terribly boring. When the Golden Globe nominations were announced in mid-December, it was hard to believe that Memoirs...

Because, Because, Because

A short look at a short list of 2005's best films. Because, to film fans, the countdown to midnight Dec. 31 is really only the beginning of a more important countdown ' the one to the plush red...

Into the Woods

A visually imaginative but sometimes uneven version of C.S. Lewis' beloved Narnia series roars onto the big screen. Lucy Pevensie is the baby of the family, which mostly means that she spends her...

Future Schlock

Sci-fi thriller Aeon Flux is pretty ' and pretty problematic. Animation film adaptations can be the worst. Mess with what the fans love and prepare to run for cover. The Internet lit up like a...

Austen Limits

Not even a first-time director with an overactive romantic imagination can completely derail a modern classic. Debuting director Joe Wright is lucky that it's metaphysically impossible to make a bad...

The Man Comes Around

James Mangold's Johnny Cash biopic rests on the solid shoulders of Joaquin Phoenix ' and the impertinent twang of Reese Witherspoon. The world should weep once a day for the passing of Johnny Cash....

Fun (Enough) for theWhole Family

Zathura and Chicken Little, achieve kid-friendly ' if not instant classic ' status. A pesky younger brother just wants to be noticed. An accident-prone egghead chick just wants to be believed. Such...

The Whole Truth ¦ and Nothing But?

Director George Clooney's stylish, straightforward Good Night, and Good Luck takes a look at TV news, then and now. A weary Edward R. Murrow stares morosely off into space. He takes a drag off a...

The Great Fight North

Indie darling Niki Caro clumsily tackles the taboos of sex, gender and harassment in her mainstream debut North Country. It somehow seems cynical to criticize North Country, a serious film tackling a...

Worth Sticking Around For

Sit still for Stay's surreal artistry, odd emotionalism and engaging performances. Director Marc Forster (Monster's Ball, Finding Neverland) populates his new film Stay with a tangled texture of...

Heartland of Darkness

A History of Violence brings mayhem to Middle America. Director David Cronenberg writes short stories on the big screen. Barely longer than chapters, yet deeper and more difficult than many a hefty...

A Matter of Wife and Death

Tim Burton's macabre fairy tale shows that love lives forever and genius never dies. Leave it to Tim Burton to marry 21st century stop-animation technology with a story born of 19th century Jewish...

The Devil You Know

The Exorcism of Emily Rose takes the possibility of demon possession to court, but the cinematic case fails to stand on its own merits. Demon-possessed or psychotically epileptic? The Exorcism of...

Bones to Pick

Stereotypes and clichés loom large and spooky in The Skeleton Key. The universe is filled with big questions, questions whose answers are profoundly important and monstrously frightening to...

Bat Out of Hell

Why see a lousy remake of The Bad News Bears when you can stay home and rent the 1976 original? When the writer of Ecclesiastes observed that there really isn't all that much new under the sun, he...

Rout of This World

The only thing that Steven Spielberg's movie about the end of the world needs is a better ending. War of the Worlds is almost good enough to make you forget that Tom Cruise has gone insane. About...

Bat to the Bone

The fifth installment of the Batman franchise obliterates its predecessors. Who thought up the idea of turning over the reins of the Caped Crusader comic-book-movie franchise to indie it-boy...

Revenge of the Sixth

Director George Lucas seeks redemption in Star Wars: Episode III ' Revenge of the Sith. For geek-chic filmmaker George Lucas, the second third time is the charm. OK, technically Revenge of the Sith...

Slouching Towards Jerusalem

In Ridley Scott's 'Kingdom of Heaven,' neither side wins in the crusades for the Holy Land. Jerusalem is a city continually destroyed by those who desperately want to save it. Coveted for centuries...

Sox and the Single Man

While it's no home run, 'Fever Pitch' is an enjoyable afternoon at the ball park. Baseball movies are always about so much more than just baseball. There's the faith-based Field of Dreams and the...

Sin-Sational

A dark comic book comes alive brilliantly on the silver screen. Sin City is a place where a man's darkest dreams come true. The town's most prominent residents might be shadows and pain, but in its...

No Jacket Required

A tense thriller about memory? Forget about it. There are several kinds of Oscar nominees/actors. The shoo-in: a Tom Hanks whose sensibilities generally lean toward the types of projects that Oscar...

Red-Carpet Roulette

Handicapping the 2004 Oscar race It seems that Oscar's guest list always raises a few eyebrows. Every year, a handful of interlopers somehow find themselves receiving the VIP treatment, while once...

Sorry, Charlie

'Hide and Seek' never quite finds its way. Note to all aspiring/current horror/suspense writer/directors: The next Sixth Sense will have to be more than just a Sixth Sense knock-off. Seamless...

Elektra Shock

A Daredevil spinoff is surprisingly satisfying. Elektra has "bad idea" written all over it. A director and star best known (maybe only known) for their work on the small screen. A spin-off...


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