Directed by Miguel Arteta. Screenplay by Mike White. Starring Mike White, Chris Weitz, Lupe Ontiveros, Beth Colt, and Paul Weitz.

It has taken moviemakers and, more crucially, foot-dragging movie investors, almost a decade to catch up with rave culture, the heady mix of secret warehouses, electronic music, designer drugs, and ecstatic dancing that has come to define the yearning and the restlessness of a generation. But now, the 5:00 a.m…

In the new Jim Carrey farce, Me, Myself & Irene, the rubber-faced comedian plays a meek Rhode Island state trooper named Charlie, whose aggressions are so pent up that they finally break out in the form of a second personality called Hank. Where Charlie silently endures potty-mouth curses from little…

In the rich mythology of The New Yorker, a periodical renowned for the quality of its writing and the quirks of its writers, no legend carries more weight than that of Joseph Mitchell. On the occasion of the magazine’s 75th anniversary, it is currently great sport among the literati to…

The world’s demand for minimally talented 30-year-old high school dropouts who believe they’re great poets or great musicians or great movie directors isn’t going to catch up with the supply anytime soon. That won’t keep the strivers from striving, of course, nor will it snuff out their dreams. Case in…

At first glance Pedro Almodovar’s All About My Mother seems uncharacteristically grim for a filmmaker with such a demonic sense of humor. Within ten minutes the heroine’s seventeen-year-old son is hit and killed by a car, which propels her and the events of the film into motion. In the next…

The heroines of Gavin O’Connor’s offbeat road movie Tumbleweeds are a struggling single mother named Mary Jo Walker (Janet McTeer) and her feisty twelve-year-old daughter Ava (Kimberly J. Brown), who set out together from a back hollow in West Virginia to make a new life, or something like one, in…

The world’s demand for minimally talented 30-year-old high school dropouts who believe they’re great poets or great musicians or great movie directors isn’t going to catch up with the supply anytime soon. That won’t keep the strivers from striving, of course, nor will it snuff out their dreams. Case in…

Trust Allison Anders and her old running mate Kurt Voss to come up with a piquant, carefully observed movie about tarnished hope, overfed vanity, and half-baked scheming on the treacherous L.A. music scene. They know the territory. In 1988 the ex-UCLA film school classmates wrote and directed Border Radio, one…

Actor Frank Whaley has appeared in more than 30 movies, including Swimming with Sharks and Pulp Fiction. But none of them cuts as close to the bone, I suspect, as Whaley’s debut in the writer-director ranks, Joe the King. Set in the Seventies and carefully described by its maker as…

Jesus, Mary, and Joseph! The repressed Irish-Catholic schoolgirl that Molly Shannon plays on Saturday Night Live is certainly not everyone’s cup of glee. But there’s no denying the tug she exerts on anyone whose past is littered with the dry husks of Latin verbs and memories of nuns swinging big…

Grownups, take heart. Even if you misspent your summer at the movies pigging out on reheated space adventure, slob humor, and stubborn, old ballplayers who won’t hang up their spikes, all is not lost. A powerful and intelligent film called American Beauty has volumes to say about the way people…

If Kevin Williamson has anything to say about it, the good works of noble movie schoolteachers like Mr. Chips and Miss Dove and Mr. Holland will be wiped out in one fell swoop. In their place the creator of TV’s hormonal Dawson’s Creek series proposes an unmitigated horror: a high…

It has been almost 40 years since Eric Rohmer, riding the crest of the French New Wave, embarked on the first of his Six Moral Tales. The series eventually would include at least two classics: My Night at Maud’s (1969) and Chloe in the Afternoon (1972). Linked by theme, style,…

It’s always amusing when the movie industry discovers its spiritual side. Profoundly secular institution that it is, Hollywood promotes, at its peril, the notion that teenagers spewing pea soup in Georgetown can be purged of their demons by Catholic priests, that angels from heaven intercede in the lives of ballplayers…

For Morgan J. Freeman (a young writer-director, not the well-known actor), comic timing couldn’t get any worse — or better. That’s because one of the unhappy teenagers in Freeman’s second feature, Desert Blue, is a melancholy girl dressed in moody black who likes to detonate homemade bombs. The Columbine High…

To hear Spike Lee tell it, Summer of Sam means to be a panoramic view of the summer of 1977 in New York City, when temperatures shot into the high 90s and power blackouts set nerves on edge; when the party agenda included snorting coke at Studio 54 and copulating…

Woe to the scribbler who presumes to rewrite a master, unless he is so deft that his invasion of privacy produces something new and exciting. Enter British writer-director Oliver Parker. He has the nerve to meddle with Oscar Wilde’s sublime farce An Ideal Husband and the skill to pull it…

In John Sayles’s Limbo, which is set amid the rough-and-tumble of southeast Alaska, an ex-salmon fisherman with guilty memories (David Strathairn), an itinerant lounge singer with a lousy voice (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio), and the singer’s melancholy teenage daughter (newcomer Vanessa Martinez) become stranded, Robinson Crusoe-style, on a remote island. This…

The peerless Ethiopian distance runner Haile Gebrselassie is a tiny man (five foot three and barely 115 pounds), but in his native country his heroism looms large. Since 1994 he has set fifteen world records at five different distances, and at the 1996 Summer Olympic Games in Atlanta, he outdueled…

It has not been lost on the Quinn brothers (actor Aidan, cinematographer Declan, and writer/director Paul) that in old Gaelic culture the tribal bard, or storyteller, was held in the highest esteem. The Quinns want to be Irish storytellers, too, and to that end they have loaded up This Is…

Relentlessly hip? You better be. Enjoy pretentious talk about the great god Art and the hidden meanings in old gangster movies? Couldn’t hurt. Like to sit up till dawn smoking black cigarettes and exchanging ironic barbs about the tragedy of life? Bingo. Amos Poe, an East Village-based avant-gardian since the…