Holiday moviegoers should be forewarned: The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, while not to be missed, requires an adjustment from its blockbuster predecessor, The Fellowship of the Ring. Decidely a... 
When Peter Jackson decided to film J.R.R. Tolkien's epic fantasy tale The Lord of the Rings, he inherited a classic story and a brand name. But he also invited a hailstorm of challenges: a potentiall... 
What do Jim Carrey and Woody Allen have in common with Ben Stiller and Will Smith. Both were rumored pairings to star as the conjoined twins in the Farrelly Brothers' ultimate buddy picture Stuck on... 
Fairfield, California mother admits that her favorite book as a child was Cheaper by the Dozen, but only a supreme faith in humanity can explain the love and patience this mother of thirteen children... 
The way I see it, the sour Bad Santa has two comic assets (neither of which should be underestimated): a funny cast, headlined by Billy Bob Thornton, and more swearing than American cinema has heard... 
In his first English-language feature, 21 Grams, director Alejandro González Iñárritu choreographs the dread follies of life and death. The crushing import of life-blood and seme... 
I'm not sure what accounts for the bizarre nexus this year of Girls Will Be Girls and Die Mommie Die!, two drag homages to washed-up, boozy, drug-addled Hollywood royalty and the back-stabbing such q... 
When Ron Howard's version of The Alamo--set to star Russell Crowe--fell apart due to budget concerns, Howard licked his wounds and apparently told his agent, bring me the Western scripts. But just as... 
Nothing says "beware, moviegoers" like top billing for Paul Walker, Hollywood's favorite open-mouthed bass. Before he opens his prodigious aperture, Walker is the all-American hero-next-door: slight... 
I'm back with another critical rhyme.It's The Cat in the Hat with Mike Myers this time.Perhaps this is blasphemous, but I found it funny;For sure, it's a license to make and print money.For the most... 
Tupac: Resurrection makes for a solid documentary about an enduring and controversial artist. Though insular and limited like its stylistic forebear The Kid Stays in the Picture (about Hollywood prod... 
They say nothing succeeds like success, which partly explains the meteoric rise of journalists like Jayson Blair and Stephen Glass. Their flashy but callow, mendacious mediocrity led each to a new le... 
It's some measure of writer-director Richard Curtis's sheer force of will with Love Actually that while I harbor serious doubts that it's a good movie, I feel compelled to award it a qualified recomm... 
The Matrix Reloaded--the brain-fried sequel to The Matrix--raised plenty of questions earlier this year. The purported final chapter to The Matrix trilogy--The Matrix Revolutions--answers only one of... 
Were it not for Oscar-caliber talent in front of the camera, Radio would be a straight-to-PAX-TV movie. To some, perhaps that is a selling point. As an uplifting, PG-rated sports drama, Radio will al... 
When I said, "I'd watch Gene Hackman read the phone book," I didn't mean it literally, and yet, here we have Runaway Jury, an insultingly dumb "legal" thriller adapted by four screenwriters from John... 
With Veronica Guerin, producer Jerry Bruckheimer and director Joel Schumacher efficiently embalm their titular heroic martyr. A true story told in the language and at the speed of a Hollywood thrille... 
As usual, the Coen Brothers are so damn clever. The gang's all here, from composer Carter Burwell to cinematographer Roger Deakins to fictional editor Roderick Jaynes (a pseudonym for the writer-dire... 
For the benefit of the uninitiated, Jack Black is a force of nature. The Tenacious D rocker and film-starring funnyman is a one-man band who makes his music with a bizarre patois of nicknames and eup... 
Out of Time may not be terribly ambitious, but it is...nifty. With an above-average (if highly incredible) premise and the identifiable Everyman stylings of Denzel Washington, Carl Franklin executes...
Watching Horns and Halos is to invite your lower lip to take a vacation from your upper lip. This stranger-than-fiction tale of a deeply neurotic George W. Bush biographer and the punk-rock publisher... 
"Every 23rd spring...for 23 days...it gets to eat." And every year Hollywood studios seem to devour youngsters with summer sequel jaws. 2001's Jeepers Creepers exercised a confident command of pace a... 
The poster for Los Lunes al sol (Mondays in the Sun) proclaims, "This film is not based on a real story. It is based on thousands." Inspired by a major layoff at the boatyards of Gijón which l... 
Jacki--the front-woman of a punk rock quartet--faces her fortieth birthday and a nagging Hobson's Choice: "bitter rock chick with a band, bitter rock chick without a band." Prey for Rock and Roll, th... 
When Hollywood flirts with bad-natured black comedy, Danny DeVito frequently takes the directorial reins. The early comedic glories of Throw Momma From the Train and the delicious The War of the Rose... 
Audrey Wells's filmic version of Frances Mayes's bestselling travelogue-memoir Under the Tuscan Sun misses the boat. Those expecting an earthy, realistic take on Mayes's self-rediscovery by way of an... 
Woody Allen's recent press has raised cause for concern among Allen conoisseurs. For years now, Allen has gear-shifted like a man trying out a new 5-speed car; frothy hit-and-miss comedies have kept... 
Like its titular homestead, Cold Creek Manor is a musty, old fixer-upper. Another thriller pitting a compromised, upper-middle-classy family against evil, low-bred trash, this rather obvious button-p... 
There's no denying that there's something quaintly appealing about Secondhand Lions, a family film that plays like a slow skim through a Boy's Life magazine. Unfortunately, writer-director Tim McCanl... 
If Matchstick Men doesn't quite reach a level of stylish substance, it at least achieves substantive style. In more cutesy directorial hands and with lesser acting talent, Matchstick Men might be eas... 
A run-of-the-mill feel-dumb comedy, Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star takes a potentially funny (if dangerously played-out) premise and grinds it into Saturday Night Live-movie mulch. Early in this D... 
Jackie Chan fans (like myself) are bound to feel more of the aging action star's growing pains than usual this time around. The Medallion, a cheap-feeling, English-language hybrid of American dollars... 
What Cabin Fever lacks in discipline, it makes up for in squirmy fun. A creepy-crawly nightmare at turns laughable and genuinely disturbing, Cabin Fever might be, superficially, a bad movie, but prac... 
The love-child of M*A*S*H and Catch-22, Gregor Jordan's Buffalo Soldiers continually promises to erupt, but when it does, it does so not into full-bore satire but rather plot-satisfying theatrics. Th... 
Based on a manga by Kazuo Koike and Kazuo Kamimura, The Princess Blade is one of the self-serious HK martial arts flicks (as opposed to the goofy, knowingly self-parodic ones). That would be fine, if... 
It's a measure of Kevin Costner's bizarre instincts (or perhaps his own internal range-war of art vs. commerce) that the death of a dog is given more emotional weight than the death of a man in his n... 
Uptown Girls is a daddy's-little-princess movie with two dead daddies and two psychologically damaged princesses. Nevertheless, director Boaz Yakin keeps the tone consistently zany, escorting stars B... 
It's tempting to give Passionada a pass for what it gets right, but this otherwise unassuming film--which aspires to old-fashioned Hollywood charm--has an albatross around the neck of its typically c... 
Writer-director Aleksandr Rogozhkin says of his film Cuckoo "We have not had a cinema of this kind before," which is a bit misleading and a trifle hyperbolic. Jumping off from the notion of the Tower... 
The long-awaited Freddy vs. Jason is an endlessly bizarre movie-going experience. At war with itself, this missive from the slasher-movie afterlife represents a collision of two separate and unequal... 