After making his mark on the Hollywood action movie scene in 1993, famed director John Woo returns to his Asian cinema roots with the Chinese war epic, "Red Cliff." Massive in scale, ridiculous with blood-soaked action, and submitting a user-friendly spectacle of warriors and weapons, "Red Cliff" is a majestic motion picture that returns Woo to the sort of whirlwind screen restlessness he built his legendary name upon.

The year is 208, and General Cao Cao (Zhang Fengyi), under the approval of the Emperor, is preparing to tear up the Chinese countryside, looking to the southlands to continue his reign of violence. Witnessing Cao Cao's lust for power, warlord Liu Bei (You Yong) fears the worst, allowing his military strategist Zhuge Liang (Takeshi Kaneshiro) to offer a solution:...Read the entire review

For his 17th film, Pedro Almodovar doesn't exactly break new ground with "Broken Embraces," instead fine tuning his gifts and decadent cinematic appetites to a satisfying routine. A spiraling, sensual story of noirish obsession and paranoia, "Embraces" is a riveting sit, due to the filmmaker's incredible storytelling gifts, and the cast, who articulate a dreamy series of toxic encounters with sniper-like precision, tightening Almodovar's noose with exceptional skill.

Harry Caine (Lluis Homar) is a blind writer who was once a filmmaker by the name of Mateo. When Caine learns of the death of wealthy industrialist Ernesto Martel (Jose Luis Gomez), it sends his mind reeling back to the early 1990s, when he was prepping a film with lead actress, and Martel's lover, Lena (Penelope C...Read the entire review

To the average cynic, "The Blind Side" might appear to be infested with cooties. Following an impressive string of feel-good racial divide entertainment offerings, "Blind Side" carries the burden of immediate derision. It turns out the film isn't the total embarrassment the Warner Brothers marketing folks would have you believe. Instead, the picture is a friendly, tender audience pleaser working broadly to reach out to a wide audience that wouldn't dare reject a compassionate tale of the affluent and sassy helping out the underprivileged and borderline mute.

After a lifetime of abuse and neglect, imposing African-American teenager Michael (Quinton Aaron) is offered an opportunity to attend a Christian school, removing him from the dangerous elements of his life in the Memphis ...Read the entire review

Precious is a sixteen-year-old girl living in Harlem in the late 1980s. She lives with her mother, Mary, who is on welfare and forces her daughter to do the household chores. When her school discovers that Precious is pregnant with her second child, they suggest she'd be better off at an "alternative school" that helps young girls get their GEDs. Precious' first child is called Mongo, short for Mongoloid, and she has Down's syndrome and lives with Precious' grandmother. Mary collects the government stipend for Mongo and for Precious both, thinking it's her due because Precious took her man--even if she doesn't know what the word "stipend" means. Both the first child and the one on the way are the result of Precious being raped by her father, who may be out of the picture but w...Read the entire review

It was only a year ago when "Twilight" entered my life. I had no history with the book, held immense reservations with the cast and crew, and found the hysteria surrounding the release obnoxiously manufactured by a desperate studio. And then I watched the film, finding every last one of my fears confirmed. "Twilight" was a dreadful picture on multiple levels, but most pointedly it was a shoddily produced affair entirely dependent on forgiving teen enthusiasm to provide colossal box office returns. Here we are again one year later with "The Twilight Saga: New Moon," and there have been a few changes to the franchise. Changes for the better.

Engorged with love for her vampire honey Edward (Robert Pattinson), Bella (Kristen Stewart) is facing the end of high school, eager to star...Read the entire review

I suppose after the sugar rush of wonderful family films such as "Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs" and "Fantastic Mr. Fox," the high was bound to crash at some point. "Planet 51" is the party pooper, looking to pass itself off as a spirited sci-fi romp crammed with slapstick and four-quadrant-friendly pop culture references to best wow the crowds. The picture is actually a poorly conceived comedy spotlighting a collection of anal-centric humor that's about as appealing as baseball bat to the face. After watching a few creative minds take the animation genre to soaring heights, the dreadful routine and vulgar imagination of "Planet 51" is all the more dispiritingly amplified.

Life on Planet 51 is good, with the populace enjoying a 1950's standard of living, adorned with hover...Read the entire review

Yoav Shamir's Defamation is a fascinatingly honest and open personal documentary that seldom steps wrong until its final moments, when he kind of blows it (more on that presently). Shamir, an Israeli director, takes on the broad and difficult concept of anti-Semitism--specifically, is it a prevalent and terrifying threat that could tip the world into another Holocaust, or a scare tactic used for purposes of guilt, fundraising, and attention to agendas?

The truth of the matter is, it's probably somewhere in between. Shamir's film is distinctively homemade (right down to the handwriting style of the on-screen text), but he certainly doesn't lack for ambition; he travels from Israel to America to Moscow to Poland to points in between, talking to school kids, fellow journalists, activists, professors, and his slightly crazy grandmother. He spends a great deal of time with Abe Foxman, the h...Read the entire review

In the high stakes Hollywood blockbuster poker game, Roland Emmerich is going all in with "2012." A disaster movie to end all disaster movies, "2012" is an enormous moviegoing event guaranteed to make eyes bleed and ears burst with its sheer scale and thundering execution. To bend the dictionary a little, it's positively ginormous. "2012" is also disturbingly repetitive, obnoxiously noisy, and almost pornographic in length. Instead of providing a comforting bowl of melted apocalyptic cheese, Emmerich wants to beat the living hell out of his audience instead, staging doom after doom, death after death, until it reaches a nauseating spin of sensorial overload. It's cinematic waterboarding and there was more than one occasion during the film when I was convinced it was never...Read the entire review

The karaoke scene. It's become an epidemic. I've seen an inordinate amount of comedies over the last few years employ a karaoke bar as a comedic device, typically involving a fuddy-duddy character finding screechy vocal salvation at the hand of a memorable '80's hit. If there's anything that immediately signals lazy screenwriting, it's staging slapstick at a karaoke bar. "Love Hurts" features such a scene. Actually, a few of them. However, it's the least of the offenses contained within this dreadful comedy, which runs through a checklist of clich s to make it to a contractually obligated 90-minute running time. It's a long 90 minutes.

After 20 years of marriage, Amanda (Carrie-Anne Moss) is leaving her husband, Ben (Richard E. Grant). A man of tenacious routine, the break ha...Read the entire review

When most directors repeat themselves, it's typically a sign of artistic exhaustion or perhaps unshakable fixation. In Wes Anderson's case, his visual repetition has become an irresistible thumbprint, and one of the great moviegoing joys I've encountered in recent years is the opportunity to watch this supremely gifted filmmaker use his leather-bound imagination to impart varying stories of eccentric outsiders and their enduring emotional wounds, with each film connected by exotic aesthetic degrees of detail-oriented splendor. Now Anderson takes his cinematic language to the hand-woven field of stop-motion animation for "Fantastic Mr. Fox," and, yet again, the filmmaker shapes a breathtaking cinematic marvel; he finds a magnificent home nestled firmly in the luxurious textures o...Read the entire review

I like Richard Curtis. I really do. The man directed "Love Actually" for heaven's sake, crafting one of the most charming and stark romantic comedies of the last 30 years. But his "Pirate Radio" is a flawed piece of work, at times utterly paralyzed by muddled whimsy. It'll take some effort from the viewer to sort through this cluttered feature film, but the reward is an opportunity to witness profound respect for the power of music, articulated by a throng of gifted, uninhibited actors Curtis spends most of the feature trying to corral more than simply direct.

It's the mid-1960s, and British radio is essentially ignoring the rise of iconic rock acts as they tear through popular culture. Here to help the infection is the boat Radio Rock, home to a pirate radio station, which em...Read the entire review

Take a minute and ponder the moral perfection of "Button, Button", the Richard Matheson short story on which the The Box is based. The film uses an Arthur C. Clarke quote a couple of times -- "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" -- and personally, I find Matheson's story similarly entrancing. It's amazing how many layers there are to it, and how carefully it appears to be designed, at least as presented here by Donnie Darko writer/director Richard Kelly: a stranger first leaves a locked device with a button on top, allowing the recipients to ponder it until 5pm, when the stranger returns to explain that if the recipients press the button, they will a) receive a million dollars, and b) someone they don't know, somewhere will die.

The stranger in Kelly's film is Arlington Steward (Frank Langella), which adds another air of mystery. Steward has a burn woun...Read the entire review

Well, it was fun while it lasted. The wonderfully wacky world of writer/director Richard Kelly drives off cliff with "The Box," the filmmaker's self-proclaimed shot at a "broadly commercial" film. Interestingly enough, there's nothing at all commercial about the enigmatic picture, which meticulously traces over the same lines of surrealism, spirituality, and otherworldly interference that marked Kelly's previous features, the cult smash "Donnie Darko" and the underrated brain-smasher, "Southland Tales." I would never doubt Kelly's conviction and personal belief that he's challenging himself, but "The Box" doesn't lie. It's the same old set of eye-crossing ambiguities, only this time there's something of a budget and a smudged pass at cinematic normalcy.

In Virginia circa 1976,...Read the entire review

I sat down to Disney's new big-budget adaptation of A Christmas Carol not knowing what to expect. I have read the original Dickens story but never seen any other adaptations that I can think of, other than Muppet Christmas Carol and an episode of "The Real Ghostbusters". I also enjoyed Robert Zemeckis' adaptation of The Polar Express, one of his previous films to use the high-tech motion-capture technology he's so enamored with, but I skipped Beowulf, his follow-up effort. The trailer for A Christmas Carol didn't give me much faith, but I popped on my 3D glasses and prepared myself to be dazzled. What I got was a baffling experience.

I have seen many movies, but I can't remember any that were quite like A Christmas Carol, which, sadly, is not an endorsement. It's the strangest sensation: Zemeckis' version of the story has almost no forward momentum. Obviously...Read the entire review

There are moments, many of them, in Chris Smith's new documentary Collapse when Michael Ruppert says something that causes an immediate, reflexive reaction in my head: That guy's crazy. I had that response more than once during the film, particularly in the section when he gives his tips for surviving our societal collapse (don't hoard food--hoard seeds). But there are also moments, as when he explains our current economy in plain English and summarizes it as "the whole economy is a pyramid scheme," when I found myself nodding my head and thinking, That guy makes a lot of sense. It's that kind of movie.

Smith could scarcely have selected a more intriguing subject for his film. Ruppert was a shining star on the LAPD, but his claims in the late 1970s that he was recruited by the CIA to run drugs brought that career to an end (he says that his fianc disappeared and "...Read the entire review

Of course, there will always be "I'm Gonna Git You Sucka," the crown jewel of blaxploitation spoofs. Nothing will ever equal its invention or ability to surprise. However, "Black Dynamite" is a worthy challenger for the throne. Playing straight-up silly with '70's filmmaking aesthetics, "Dynamite" isn't consistent, but it's damn funny at times. A feisty, gleefully harebrained spoof of all things "Shaft" and "Superfly," "Dynamite" is a jubilant ode to the firm cinematic pimp hand, which, in this picture, smacks bad guys around and tickles the audience with the same devotion.

An evil presence in the inner city has committed the ultimate crime: they've killed Black Dynamite's kid brother. Now Dynamite (Michael Jai White) is on a rampage, tearing up the streets to find the perpetr...Read the entire review

Jon Ronson's 2004 book, "The Men Who Stare at Goats," was a nonfiction look at the U.S. Military's effort to harness psychological manipulation as a new form of warfare. Again, nonfiction. The film version of the wily tale has rightfully selected an accelerated route of absurdity to depict the inherent weirdness, permitting the viewer a chance to enjoy the oddity without the crippling burden of a real-world hangover. Blithe and teeming with actors having the time of their lives, "Goats" is a hilarious, freewheeling descent into the abyssal madness of the military machine.

A Midwestern journalist with heavy domestic troubles, Bob Wilton (Ewan McGregor) heads over to Iraq to cover the war, looking to challenge himself and prove his worth to his cheating wife. Needing a specialis...Read the entire review

The Madeafication of African-American storytelling from Tyler Perry and his imitators has been a depressing downward spiral, reducing important social topics to countrified nonsense, often chased with a heavy wallop of misguided religious justification. Though "presented" by Tyler Perry (and Oprah Winfrey), "Precious" restores some much needed horror to abuse of all kinds, lending weight to self-esteem issues instead of playing them off as melodramatic screenwriting requirements. This is a lacerating tale of desperation and evolution, and while director Lee Daniels should do himself a favor and muzzle most of his visual instincts, he permits the material to lead the charge, creating a harrowing environment that makes for a hypnotic sit.

The year is 1987, and Precious (newcomer...Read the entire review

It's a tale told joyfully and told often, gobbling up film, stage, and audio adaptations with incredible regularity. Charles Dickens's 1843 novella, "A Christmas Carol," has been reworked and reheated time and again, and who could blame anyone for trying? Perhaps the perfect tale of rekindled morality set against the backdrop of the most enchanting of holiday seasons, "Carol" is brought back to life for another cinematic go-around, this time through the eyes of writer/director Robert Zemeckis and the efforts of his motion capture (mo-cap) animation tools. While shadowing Dickens's work as much as it can, the latest "Carol" takes a bold technological leap forward, permitting a newly abstract take on a perennial saga of remorse.

A shriveled, angular miser, Ebenezer Scrooge (voic...Read the entire review

The new movie An Education is like the cinematic equivalent of a bad boyfriend--and I mean that in the best way possible. Based on a memoir by Lynn Barber, it's actually a film about a bad boyfriend, and director Lone Scherfig (Italian for Beginners, Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself) uses the pick-up technique of just such a scoundrel, seducing us into an exhilarating crush at the start, breaking our hearts by film's end.

More important than An Education being about this rotten boy, this is also a film about Jenny, the girl upon whose behalf our heart breaks. Played by Carey Mulligan (Bleak House) in a career-making performance, Jenny is a smart girl, too smart for England in 1961. Studying hard so she might get into Oxford in a year, t...Read the entire review

The Men Who Stare at Goats, the movie in which a screenwriter stares at a true story without a three-act structure as hard as he can until a three-act structure appears.

Written by Peter Straughan (How to Lose Friends and Alienate People) from a book by Jon Ronson (who gets his name changed to Bob Wilton for the trouble), The Men Who Stare at Goats aims for the territory somewhere on a comedic map where the madcap films its star, George Clooney, has made with the Coen Bros. crosses borders with the actor's own directorial effort, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind. It's a playing field the director, Grant Heslov, should be familiar with, having produced Intolerable Cruelty and Clooney's last picture, Leatherheads. Unfortunately, though...Read the entire review

"The Fourth Kind" is being sold to the public on the wings of a gimmick. This is not a first for Hollywood, joining the likes of "White Noise" and "The Haunting in Connecticut," which used marketing angles based upon the suggestion of truth to sell an exhaustively fictional multiplex event. However, "Fourth Kind" is far more aggressive, flat-out daring the audience to believe this alien abduction tale. It's the kind of chutzpah that all but promises a scintillating, skin-crawling motion picture, but "The Fourth Kind" is actually quite stunningly ineffective for all the hot air it generates.

Please bear with me here, as the concept is a little convoluted. "Fourth Kind" posits the idea that director Olatunde Osunsami is assembling footage to investigate the strange case of Psych...Read the entire review

"An Education" is a sharply crafted ode to the loss of innocence, boasting top-shelf performances and evocative cinematography. It's also material about two tantrums and a "Gossip Girl" cast member away from becoming a Lifetime Original event, making the nuanced accomplishments of the feature shine all the more brightly. It's a wildly predictable film of extreme formula, but there's a special effort made to confront that numbing familiarity, showcasing a mature, level-headed take on a frightening coming-of-age journey.

It's 1961, and 16-year-old Jenny (Carey Mulligan) is feeling the burden of expectation from her parents (Alfred Molina and Cara Seymour), who've placed their daughter on a strict diet of schoolwork and hobbies to groom her for a future at Oxford. Into Jenny's li...Read the entire review

In 2004, Rupert Issacson and his wife Kristin found out their little boy, Rowan, was suffering from autism. Traditional medicines and therapies weren't helping the child, who fell further into fits of tantrums and incontinence. Raising Rowan they best they could, Rupert and Kristin faced a bleak future with a boy unable to break free from his mental containment. And then Rowan met Betsy, a neighboring horse, and he opened up in ways his parents never thought possible.

Directed by Michel Orion Scott, "The Horse Boy" is a potent documentary studying Rowan as he finds comfort in the presence of horses, encouraging Rupert to consider a rather bold alternative to the daily grind of pills and meltdowns. Flying the family over to Mongolia, Rupert and Kristen would introduce Rowan to ...Read the entire review

"House of the Devil" is a throwback horror film that actually makes an effort to look and sound like a bygone era. Granted, 1980's genre nostalgia is nothing cinematically revolutionary, perhaps even clich d, but writer/director Ti West keeps to the task at hand. Forgoing irony or vile retro winks, "Devil" plays it straight. While that doesn't generate the most riveting suspense piece of the year, it does deliver a hugely satisfying chiller that's effectively minimal and marvelously made.

Hoping for an apartment of her own, college student Samantha (Jocelin Donahue) can't quite come up with the first month's rent, drowning her sorrows in pizza with mouthy best friend Megan (Greta Gerwig). Spotting a help wanted flyer for a babysitter on campus, Samantha makes a call to Mr. Ul...Read the entire review

Lars von Trier, how do you do this to me? And why? I can't think of a single filmmaker whose films I admire this much but that I have to gear myself up to watch. Knowing what a difficult, provocative director you can be, and advance word that your new movie Antichrist was extremely harsh, I prepared myself as best I could. It wasn't enough.

Francois Truffaut had a theory that a viewer was not properly prepared to critique a film until he or she has seen in three or four times. I would agree with that in the case of Antichrist. There is a lot to sort through here. Unfortunately, I'd be lucky to sit through the movie a second time without closing my eyes at crucial moments, much less give it a third or fourth viewing. This is a movie that is profoundly unsettlin...Read the entire review

The title is not "This Is It," as in the hottest ticket in town. It's more "This Is It," admitting a scarcity of content. Marketed as the final goodbye to the self-proclaimed "King of Pop," this hastily assembled performance film seems less like a eulogy and more like a chance to cover the losses incurred when Jackson died during rehearsals for his pricey comeback tour. The stank of opportunism is all over this baby, and while I wouldn't begrudge the average superfan their chance to publicly mourn, "This Is It" takes Jackson's musical legacy and squeezes it for every last remaining nickel.

From April to June 2009, Michael Jackson held rehearsals for his "This Is It" megaconcert in Los Angeles, renting out an arena to work out the complex choreography and sound cues needed to b...Read the entire review

An invisible wall stands between myself and An Education. Others are quick to praise young star Carey Mulligan as Jenny, and they're certainly not wrong; she stands head and shoulders above the rest as the best part of the movie. However, the movie's story is overwhelmingly, suffocatingly predictable; it's not that the outcome is merely logical, but that the writing and direction, by Nick Hornby and Lone Scherfig, respectively, never raised my pulse in the slightest or threatened to make my heart skip a single beat. Having never been (and not likely to ever be) a sixteen-year-old girl, I was already at a distance, but none of the filmmakers make the slightest effort -- other than casting Mulligan -- to try and draw me in.

For one thing, we have Peter Sarsgaard as the supposedly dashing David, a wealthy-looking man of taste who appears at Jenny's bus stop and offers to, at the very least, drive...Read the entire review

I walked out of a screening of "Saw" in 2004 absolutely appalled with the movie. Not for the sadomasochistic violence the film would soon popularize, but for the cruddy production value and the laughably abysmal performances -- Cary Elwes should be gifted a national holiday for his whimpering, career-smothering work, effectively neutering the repulsion of the ultraviolence. I loathed the film, yet watched with some degree of surprise as the franchise developed a defensive mainstream following; kindly folk who cheerfully hurdled generous filmmaking clich s and further acting decimation to bathe in the warm pools of blood, sucking up the suffering with a bendy straw as if the nightmare were Cherry Coke.

Round after round, they kept coming back, encouraging the producers to chu...Read the entire review

It all started with a little girl. When five-year-old Lola Rock asked her father, Chris, why she didn't have "good hair," it sent a powerful message to the comedian. Curious about the business of the black hair, Rock and a camera crew traveled around the globe to discover why so many African-American women endure a daily battle with their head, tolerating chemicals and weaves to perfect a look that goes against nature's stubborn intention.

"Good Hair" is Rock's first documentary, and while extraordinarily informative, it's more of a comedy piece than something newsworthy. Looking to peek behind the curtain of the billion-dollar black hair industry, Rock is curious to find out why so many women suffer financial hardship and outright pain to alter their appearance, starting his ...Read the entire review

Well, the good news is that Audrey Tautou has made a good film again, and she didn't even need Jean-Pierre Jeunet to do it. And, well, there pretty much isn't any bad news. Coco Before Chanel is a good film. Not a great one, so maybe we can consider that the downside.

Coco Before Chanel is an unconventional biopic in which the sprightly star of Amelie gets all serious on us, playing fashion visionary Coco Chanel--though, as the title implies, before she was Coco Chanel the brand. It's all the events leading up to her success as a designer rather than the usual birth-to-death portrait. In that, it reminded me of Bright Star, Jane Campion's recent film about John Keats, which focused on...Read the entire review

Adapted from the celebrated, long-standing manga series, "Astro Boy" aims to make a big dent on the big screen with this CG-animated spectacular. Boasting glossy visuals, red-hot action, and a sparkling cast of voices, the film is ready to please, but the end product is perhaps a step too bizarre and cartoony to leave a lasting, awe-inspiring impression. It's a great character and an impetuous movie, but with all the attention placed on keeping the animation energetic and the actors satisfied, someone forgot to straighten out the erratic tone of the picture.

In Metro City, a metropolis hovering high above a polluted Earth, Dr. Tenma (voiced by Nicolas Cage) is preparing to experiment with a pure energy source intended to enhance the city's overflowing robot population. When wi...Read the entire review

There's a power of mimicry and lavish flight photography that keeps the bio-pic "Amelia" in the air. This is not a strong motion picture, nor a particularly informative one. Instead, it's a finely polished soap opera from a wonderful director starring fantastic actors, and nobody can quite connect the ambition of the piece with the execution. Moments of midair ecstasy hold it together and without those peaceful pauses of expression, "Amelia" is simply mawkish entertainment, stable and worthwhile for the average moviegoer, but it never finds a comfortable altitude.

Ever since her childhood in Kansas, Amelia Earhart (Hilary Swank) wanted to fly. Using the publicity skills of publisher George Putnam (Richard Gere), Amelia found fame as a passenger on a 1928 transatlantic flight, ...Read the entire review

The projectionist could've run this film backwards, and I don't think I would've noticed. "Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant" is a Hollywood attempt to massage author Darren Shan's 12-part saga of vampires and teenagers into a viable, cash-cow franchise. Spanning the first three novels, "Assistant" doesn't tell a story as much as it hurls everything that isn't nailed down against the wall to see what sticks. Labored and often tedious, the picture is a friendly stab at Burtonesque macabre antics, but director Paul Weitz is in way over his head trying to juggle huge portions of the grotesque and the epic.

16-year-old Darren (Chris Massoglia) is an average teen with good grades and a love for spiders. Finding a flyer for the "Cirque du Freak" sideshow, Darren decides to at...Read the entire review

In 1952, manga legend Osamu Tezuka began chronicling the adventures of Astro Boy, a child robot in a world where mechanical men were becoming increasingly more like real humans. Now it's 2009 and there is a new animated movie version of Astro Boy in which digital facsimiles of human beings are created in such a way as to make them look mechanical. This, apparently, is progress. The robots look real, the people do not.

Astro Boy is one of those movies that I take no pleasure in slagging off, because I think that the folks behind it had their hearts in the right place. Despite some dopey concessions to the American market, they clearly have a healthy respect for Tezuka's original creation, which has spawned countless comic books and various animated television sho...Read the entire review