CANNES, France — The competition for the Palme d’Or is ongoing as I write, but the story of the 61st Cannes Film Festival is Steven Soderbergh’s two-part, four-and-a-half-hour Che—an epic non-biopic that might well have been approved by Roberto Rossellini, envied by Francis Coppola, and even appreciated by its subject…

CANNES, France — No need for dreaming here. Each Cannes Film Festival generates its own metaphors for a 10-day regimen of visions in the dark. It’s impossible to forget, let alone transcend, one’s unnatural situation here. The opening film of Cannes’s 2008 edition clobbered participants with a cautionary allegory. Regardez:…

David Mamet’s Redbelt is a tricky bar brawl — call it the Roundhouse of Games. The writer-director has scarcely abandoned his sense of the movies as an innately duplicitous medium, one best suited to stories that play out as conspiratorial chess matches. But, with his 10th feature — an entertaining…

Converting a fondly remembered cartoon series — one of the first Japanese animes syndicated on American television — into a prospective franchise, the Matrix masters, Larry and Andy Wachowski, have taken another step toward the total cyborganization of the cinema. Even more than most summer-season f/x fests, Speed Racer is…

Morgan Spurlock, the daredevil documentarian who lived on Big Macs for a month and turned this exercise in “body art” into the 2004 hit Super Size Me, returns — this time expanding his horizons rather than his girth. Paraphrasing the title of a venerable computer game, Where in the World…

Youth Without Youth, Francis Ford Coppola’s self-financed return to the fray, is a curious project — well-crafted, personal, and movie-movie old-fashioned even in its vanguard aspirations. Simply put, it’s a Faustian romance about the reversal of time and transmigration of souls that, shot mainly in Romania, adds a soupçon of…

Jonathan Demme, who directed Tom Hanks to an Oscar as the AIDS-afflicted lawyer in Philadelphia, might be the most well-meaning filmmaker in Hollywood. Jimmy Carter, winner of the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize “for his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human…

A great brooding thundercloud of a movie, Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood arrives as if from nowhere on a gust of critical acclaim, lowering over a landscape of barren mesas and hot, scrubby hills. Anderson’s epic, no less than his career, is both fearfully grandiose and wonderfully eccentric…

American Gangster is a movie with obvious gravitas and a familiar argument: Organized crime is outsider capitalism. As archetypal as its title, Ridley Scott’s would-be epic aspires to enshrine Harlem dope king Frank Lucas in Hollywood heaven, heir to Scarface and the Godfather. Or, as suggested by the Mark Jacobson…

Calling all pundits. It’s a baffling caprice of the Zeitgeist to have two studio westerns released in the same month, 30-odd years after the genre basically gave up the ghost. James Mangold’s better-than-competent and highly crowd-pleasing 3:10 to Yuma has provided a harmonica fanfare for something more ambitious and polarizing…

Directed with considerable formal intelligence and brooding power by David Cronenberg, Eastern Promises is very much a companion to A History of Violence. Both are crime thrillers that allow Viggo Mortensen to play a morally ambiguous and severely divided, if not schizoid, action-hero savior; both are commissioned works that permit…

Huffing and puffing to resuscitate a long-moribund genre, James Mangold imbues a 50-year-old western with the semblance of life. Mangold’s remake of 3:10 to Yuma isn’t as startling a resurrection job as his Johnny Cash biopic, but it does send a saddlebag full of western tropes skittering into the 21st…

Asger Leth’s documentary explores the Port-au-Prince slum Cité Soleil, identified by a UN agency as the “most dangerous place on earth.” It’s a prismatic, jagged, none too coherent travelogue — a portrait of Haiti’s post-Aristide political chaos centered on the rivalry between two gang leaders or “ghosts”: the charismatic 2pac…

Nothing if not appropriate for summer blockbuster season, Werner Herzog’s latest feature, based on his 1997 documentary Little Dieter Needs to Fly, offers a suitably fantastic tale of war, freedom, and fortitude, set in the jungles of Indochina and featuring an immigrant lad who turns out to be just as…

We’re Americans. We go into other countries when we need to. It’s tricky, but it works.” So declares Michael Moore in the midst of his new documentary, Sicko. Moore may be riffing on the war in Iraq, to name only our most recent intervention, but he’s actually referring to U.S…

A skilled actor vanishes into a role; a movie star appropriates it. As presence trumps character, the star personifies Brecht’s alienation effect, and whatever its ostensible subject, the movie becomes a vehicle — the latest installment in an ongoing career or, in the case of a great star, a public…

The 60th cannes Film Festival was a generous one — and so was its jury, bestowing the Palme d’Or on the least heralded, most critically acclaimed movie in an unusually strong competition, namely Romanian director Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. Mungiu’s skillfully directed, superbly acted account…

Lowest Common Denominator-ism writ large and engraved in stone like the Ten Commandments according to Cecil B. DeMille, the Hollywood blockbuster is often an allegory for itself. Walt Disney, the notoriously litigious studio that successfully changed the nation’s copyright laws to protect its trademark Mickey Mouse but more recently declared,…

New-school genre junk food: Take a Tarantino wannabe with Sundance credentials; add a large, famous-enough cast and a show-biz backdrop; season the violence with references to Sergio Leone and Takeshi Kitano; serve cool; and garnish with a cynicism beyond irony. Smokin’ Aces is writer-director Joe Carnahan’s third and most elaborate…

Written and directed by Guillermo del Toro, Pan’s Labyrinth is something alchemical. To an astonishing degree, the 42-year-old Mexican filmmaker best known for his contribution to the Blade and Hellboy franchises has transformed the horror of mid-twentieth-century European history into a boldly fanciful example of what surrealists would call le…

History repeats itself: Eleven Decembers ago, Universal had the season’s strongest movie — a downbeat sci-fi flick freely adapted from a well-known source by a name director. With a bare minimum of advance screenings and a shocking absence of hype, the studio dumped it. This year they’ve done it again…