Tidy little Montecarlo, Georgia, which is the setting for Jonathan Lynn’s The Fighting Temptations, is a perfect movie fantasy town. At the picturesque train station, the ticket agent will call you a taxi or serve you a plate of Southern fried chicken. The house band at the local nightclub is…

The last thing the Roman Catholic Church needs at this point is another exposé of its misdeeds. The shock of the pedophilia scandals and of the official coverups isn’t going away anytime soon, and when last we looked the former bishop of the Phoenix Diocese was out on $45,000 bail…

From the lofty American vantage point, Mexico’s New Wave filmmakers have materialized like magic, the unexpected fruit of a renaissance that even many cinematically alert Yanquis hardly took the trouble to notice. Meanwhile these new directors have fashioned a vivid style that combines, in various proportions, Latin American literary experimentation,…

So much for those crackpot theories about flighty teenagers and their short attention spans. For four long years now the bland pop star Mandy Moore has stuck in the brain pan of white adolescent America like a wad of bubblegum, and there’s no sign that she will loosen her grip…

The hero of Ken Loach’s Sweet Sixteen is an isolated teenager mired in a gray Scottish slum with only a vague dream of family life to sustain him. Like previous Loach heroes — the impoverished boy who finds hope training a falcon in Kes, say, or the downtrodden working stiff…

The budding teenage poet in Karen Moncrieff’s Blue Car writes melancholy verse about autumn leaves falling off trees and fathers abandoning their daughters. Predictably, the girl’s floundering mother is too harried and too strapped for cash to pay much attention to her, and her troubled little sister is endlessly needy…

Filmmaker Terry Gilliam is no stranger to fiasco. After all, this is the human dynamo who saw 1989’s inventive (if sometimes incoherent) The Adventures of Baron Munchausen through a series of artistic and financial crises that would have landed most people in an asylum. But Gilliam’s encounter with the tale-spinning…

Where in hell does all this stuff come from? That’s a question constantly posed by readers, moviegoers, and half-soused nightclub audiences. What are the sources of an artist’s art? What weird compulsion enables a performer to stand naked before the prying eye of a camera, an empty canvas, or a…

Director David Cronenberg has led his loyal fans down some pretty spooky corridors, including the telepathic netherworld of Scanners, the violent sibling rivalry of twin gynecologists in love with the same woman (Dead Ringers), and the drug-haunted imagination of William S. Burroughs (Naked Lunch). So it comes as no surprise…

While virtually no one in this country foresaw the American disaster in Vietnam, the late British writer Graham Greene glimpsed it with astonishing clarity a decade before the first U.S. “advisor” set foot on Vietnamese soil. Greene’s 1955 novel The Quiet American, which has now been made into a disturbing…

Compiled in the cold light of day, the sum of Chuck Barris’s contributions to American culture are the top 40 ditty “Palisades Park,” which he wrote in 1962, and his discovery, a few years later, that many people are willing to make complete fools of themselves in front of a…

Martin Scorsese’s latest epic of the streets, Gangs of New York, means to show us how a great metropolis was forged in the mid-nineteenth-century cauldrons of unbridled greed, ethnic violence, and Civil War. It means to give us the city as wild frontier — without the usual cowboy hats. This…

Goodbye, Mr. Chips. Hello, Mr. Hundert. If we can judge by the new Kevin Kline vehicle, The Emperor’s Club, the notions remain alive (if not particularly well) that a self-sacrificing boarding school teacher can enrich the lives of his students while subsisting in relative emotional misery himself — and that…

If nothing else, give French actor Yvan Attal credit for his faith in domestic bliss. At a time when matrimony has a shorter lifespan than mayonnaise, Attal has sought to mingle the joys and traumas of his own marriage (to actress Charlotte Gainsbourg) with his piquant views on the ambiguities…

It’s no surprise that the Louisiana-born novelist Rebecca Wells has seen her wildly popular books translated into eighteen languages, with no less than six million copies in print. She’s no deep-thinking stylist, but she has an unfailing gift for injecting Southern sentimentality, low-grade neurosis, and mischievous charm into stories that…

The two slacker antiheroes of Alfonso Cuarón’s Y Tu Mamá También (And Your Mother, Too) come furnished with all the usual glitches of late adolescence — raging hormones, impatient wanderlust, contempt for their elders, and a jones for dope and beer. In fact Julio (Gael García Bernal) and Tenoch (Diego…

Over the past half-century, countless filmmakers great and obscure have stood in serious debt to The Bicycle Thief. But for my money, no one has borrowed so cleverly or shifted the weight of Vittorio De Sica’s 1948 masterpiece so gracefully as young Wang Xiaoshuai, whose Beijing Bicycle embodies the spirit…

Victor Hugo called grief “a divine and terrible radiance which transfigures the wretched,” and anyone who has ever found himself touching the sleeve of his father’s favorite jacket on the day after his funeral, gazing at the toy-strewn floor in a dead child’s playroom, or surveying the carnage on a…

The tricked-up charms of James Mangold’s Kate & Leopold may be precisely what the moment demands — as long as you accept the existence of chivalry, the possibility of time travel, and the stream of bubbles emanating from Meg Ryan. Skeptics need not apply. Having toured the psychiatric ward in…

The most daunting thing for an actor is to portray a god, and when that god comes equipped with a tangle of myths and the quickest left jab in history, the actor’s job can soon verge into guesswork. To Will Smith’s credit, he has managed to get, at least partway,…

It takes a nimble mind to mix light and dark, to wed humor with treachery, and in Novocaine newcomer David Atkins is not always up to the task. Neither is Steve Martin, who wants to be taken seriously while reserving the right to produce the occasional sick yuk. If you…

Joel and Ethan Coen’s periodic genuflections to classic Hollywood are inevitably accompanied by a knowing wink from one brother and a wry smile from the other. These devoted movie buffs’ versions of vintage gangster pictures (Miller’s Crossing) or the populist comedies of Frank Capra and Preston Sturges (The Hudsucker Proxy)…