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 veer 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)…

The beautiful little conceit at the heart of Brad Anderson’s Happy Accidents is that audiences will sit still once more for the crackpot notion of time travel — and in a movie that’s not science fiction. To his credit, and with an implied bow to Back to the Future and…

Tran Anh Hung’s beautiful meditation on family ties and family traumas, The Vertical Ray of the Sun, marks a captivating new chapter in the career of the writer-director who gave Americans their first glimpse of Vietnamese filmmaking. In 1994 Tran’s The Scent of Green Papaya made its way here, and…

When last we spotted indie icons Vince Vaughn and Jon Favreau on-screen together, they were knocking back fruit-flavored martinis and chasing L.A. skirt in the inventive Gen X hit Swingers. The goofy charm of that phenomenon now gives way, I’m sad to report, to a labored fringes-of-the-Mob comedy titled Made,…

German filmmaker Tom Tykwer has a gift for fusing psychological complexity and crackling plot without forsaking the excitements of either. The success of Run Lola Run didn’t exactly turn Tykwer into a household name, but it earned him his props as a young lion of the art houses. Moviegoers hungry…

In the movies, dead husbands and dearly departed boyfriends have an irksome habit of revisiting the women who once loved them — usually at inconvenient moments. Consider Demi Moore in Ghost. Poor thing had to put up with the dramatically challenged shade of Patrick Swayze, who droned on and on…

Irish. Sex. Farce. These are not three words you see snuggled up together very often. Given the ironclad no-noes of the Catholic Church, the preoccupations imposed by their political troubles for the last eight centuries or so, and frequent commutes to the local pub, the Irish probably haven’t had much…

The heroine of Andrucha Waddington’s Me You Them is a force of nature who holds men in her thrall and deftly reshapes them to suit life. Without knowing it they fall prey to her charms, her spirit, her very scent. But she’s no Cleopatra dripping with jewels, no Lucrezia Borgia…

The year 2000 was by no means the best of times for moviegoers, but only a curmudgeon would fail to find, say, ten points of light in a darkened room. 1. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon Once we marveled at the flying gymnastics of Bruce Lee. Now it’s Ang Lee who…

The moods of Kenneth Lonergan’s You Can Count on Me are so artfully mingled that it’s difficult to get a fix on this highly personal independent feature. Set in a quiet little town in upstate New York’s lovely Catskill Mountains, it is at once a drama about the unresolved traumas…

About halfway through the megabudget mountain climbing adventure Vertical Limit, even the most rugged, thrill-hungry fans of disaster movies may find themselves going numb. Not from the howling weather on the icy face of K2, in the Himalayas, where the action supposedly takes place. Not from oxygen deprivation. Not even…

The soon-to-be-talked-about sensations in Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem For a Dream include three or four flashing, near-subliminal montages that combine an eye’s iris and dilating pupil, an extreme closeup of heroin cooking in a teaspoon, and a sucking hypodermic needle; a surpassingly frightening sequence in which Ellen Burstyn, in the midst…

The setting of Stephen Daldry’s uplifting comedy Billy Elliot, the story of a working-class boy who wants to be a ballet dancer, is a beleaguered coal-mining town in the north of England, circa 1984. A coat of grime covers the squat, brick row houses, drying laundry flaps sadly in the…

Irish charm and British eccentricity are hot properties on this side of the pond — especially among U.S. moviegoers. Witness the phenomenal success here of The Secret of Roan Inish, in which a ten-year-old Irish girl finds her lost brother living among seals off her country’s rugged western coast, or…

As any Klump family member can tell you, this has been a hot summer for black comedians. New movies starring Martin Lawrence, the Wayans brothers, and Eddie Murphy have already pulled down more than $300 million at the box office, and by the time Chris Rock’s remake of Heaven Can…

For most Americans, the social and political issues underlying José Luis Cuerda’s Butterfly may seem remote at best. The tensions between republicans and fascists in Spain after the fall of that nation’s monarchy in 1931, as well as dictator Francisco Franco’s victory in the bloody Spanish Civil War, may have…

The bewildering penchant of recent American movies for glorifying the lovable naif, the perpetual adolescent, and the village idiot takes a strange new turn in Miguel Arteta’s dark comedy Chuck & Buck. Arteta’s hero, Buck O’Brien (Mike White), is a 27-year-old man-child who eats lollipops all day long, takes refuge…

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 have to break out in the form of a second personality called “Hank.” Where Charlie silently endures potty-mouthed curses from…

Unless you’re iron-willed Margaret Thatcher or some other sort of imperialist nostalgiaphile, it’s hard to get choked up these days about the demise of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy. For one thing it’s now 80 years after the fact; for another, joint government in Ireland remains a dicey proposition, and the Troubles…

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…