The Road Home is the tenth feature from Zhang Yimou, still the mainland Chinese director best known to international audiences. (His closest competition is Chen Kaige, who made Farewell My Concubine and Temptress Moon.) His latest film has a couple of things going for it: It represents a synthesis of…

Who would have imagined that at this late date — more than half a century after the end of World War II, after The Diary of Anne Frank, Schindler’s List, Au Revoir, Les Enfants, Pierre Sauvage’s documentary Weapons of the Spirit, and Jan Kadar’s amazing The Shop on Main Street…

Chopper, the first feature from Australian video director Andrew Dominik, is a strong, effective, but often stomach-churning portrait of notorious Aussie criminal Mark “Chopper” Read. It can be characterized as sensational — in both the positive and negative senses of the word. According to the filmmakers, Chopper Read is a…

Welcome to the movies of summer 2001! Of course whether you’ll actually feel welcome is another issue: Hollywood is doing its usual stuff to attract the most dollars, which may not always mean your dollars … unless you belong to that centrally crucial demographic — males, ages 13 to 25…

Amid the plethora of films with Freddie Prinze, Jr., Mena Suvari, Chris Klein, and Jason Biggs, it’s nice — in theory at least — to see a contemporary romantic comedy, like Someone Like You, where the characters, while hardly over the hill, are all over 30. In practice, however, “nice”…

As its title suggests, Spy Kids is an action fantasy aimed primarily at the preteen/early-teen audience. For all its thrills — and it has plenty — it’s strictly a PG film, which is all the more surprising when you consider its source: Robert Rodriguez, master of bloody gunplay and monster…

Im Kwon Taek has long been the best-known Korean director in the United States; in fact it would be fair to say he’s pretty much the only even vaguely known Korean director, and even then his renown is strictly among festivalgoers. The general distribution of his latest film, Chunhyang, should…

With luck Yi Yi (A One and a Two), the seventh release from writer-director Edward Yang, one of Taiwan’s most respected filmmakers, will open a vein of interest in Taiwan’s cinema, but it will be an uphill struggle. While it’s a rich and rewarding film, its pace is more leisurely…

Director John Herzfeld’s 1996 feature, the droll and underrated 2 Days in the Valley, was a more than adequate counterbalance to the catastrophe of his first feature, Two of a Kind, a 1983 John Travolta vehicle (which, together with Moment by Moment, put its star on the fast track from…

With In the Mood for Love, Wong Kar-wai solidifies his stature as the subtlest and most idiosyncratic of Hong Kong directors. In an industry best known for its accessible, crowd-pleasing comedies and action films, Wong has turned out a series of increasingly risky dramas that make little or no concession…

For slightly more than a decade, Chinese martial arts films have directly and indirectly gained a growing audience in the United States. Now the genre may find its greatest breakthrough coming from an unlikely source: director Ang Lee, best known for comedy-dramas of social manners such as Sense and Sensibility,…

Finding Forrester is the latest film from director Gus Van Sant, one of the true American originals to emerge in the Eighties and Nineties. When Van Sant is at his best, he gives us stories and images we’ve never seen before. Finding Forrester, however, is not Gus Van Sant at…

The current release of French director Nicole Garcia’s Place Vendôme, which was nominated for eleven César Awards when it debuted in France two years ago, is yet another sign that the dropoff in French imports that has plagued U.S. screens in recent years is reversing. This is roughly the fifteenth…

November may mean Thanksgiving to most of you, but in the film biz, it means a rush of “serious” films trying to gouge an impression into the short memories of Oscar voters. This shouldn’t be a bad thing, but since the relationship between “Oscar” and “actual interesting filmmaking” is nearly…

Joel Schumacher goes to Vietnam: What else does one really have to know about Tigerland? Schumacher, for those readers fortunate enough not to have their brains cluttered with the sort of Hollywood detritus that afflicts some of us as an occupational hazard, is the auteur behind commercial confections such as…

On deadline to churn out an article about relationships, women’s magazine writer Kate Wells (Famke Janssen) reviews the history of her many doomed affairs, particularly her recently ended romance with artist Adam Levy (Jon Favreau). Filmmaker Valerie Breiman is a former actress who moved behind the camera with fare such…

It’s a pleasure to say that Clint Eastwood reverses his recent downward slide –A Perfect World (1993), The Bridges of Madison County (1995), Absolute Power (1997), and True Crime (1999), each of which has seemed less satisfying than its predecessor — with Space Cowboys, his latest. It isn’t an especially…

Canadian documentarian Ron Mann, who previously examined aspects of pop culture in Comic Book Confidential (1988) and Twist (1992), takes on a broader and more controversial subject in Grass, a history of America’s second-favorite smokable substance. As he has done before, he provides a sugarcoated crash course on a huge…

Why is this film called Disney’s The Kid? Is it really possible the studio was so concerned that someone might actually mistake the film for an update of the Chaplin classic that the brand name had to be formally incorporated into the title? Or was this an attempt to reinforce…

Director Alison Maclean, from Canada by way of New Zealand, turns her camera on the American landscape — or more accurately the underbelly of the American landscape — in Jesus’ Son, an uneven but often effective adaptation of Denis Johnson’s autobiographical book. Billy Crudup stars as a thoroughly marginalized character…

Kikujiro, the latest release from Japanese filmmaker Takeshi Kitano, is likely to be a surprise — possibly even a disappointment — to his American fans if they walk in unprepared. In fact the movie is altogether worthwhile, so just get yourselves prepared.Kitano attracted international attention when his first two movies…

Holy moly! Yet another version of Hamlet? Will they never stop? Ah well, at least Michael Almereyda’s new adaptation is one of those really different takes on the venerable play. While the last two widely seen versions (the 1990 Mel Gibson/Franco Zeffirelli film and the four-hour-plus 1996 Kenneth Branagh/Kenneth Branagh…