History repeats itself: 11 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, it’s done it again…

The Good German, directed by Steven Soderbergh from Joseph Kanon’s bestseller, is as much simulation as movie. Specifically, it’s the simulation of a 1940s private eye flick. It’s not just a period film but one that feigns being shot as it would have been in that period. Filmed for maximum…

The Good German, directed by Steven Soderbergh from Joseph Kanon’s bestseller, is as much simulation as movie. Specifically, it’s the simulation of a 1940s private eye flick. It’s not just a period film, but one that feigns being shot as it would have been in that period. Filmed for maximum…

Apocalypto has a faux Greek title and an opening quote from historian Will Durant that ruminates on the decline of imperial Rome. It may seem an odd way to comment on the supposed end of an imaginary, unspeakably barbaric Mayan civilization — but WWJD? Mel Gibson means to be universal…

Do artists actually see more than ordinary people? That’s what my high school art teacher thought. So, apparently, does Nicole Kidman — or at least, that’s the way she plays Diane Arbus (1923-71) in the celebrated photographer’s exceedingly curious “imaginary portrait,” Fur. Kidman acted around a prosthetic proboscis to win…

Fast Food Nation, directed by Richard Linklater from Eric Schlosser’s 2001 bestselling exposé of the McDonald’s conspiracy, is an anti-commercial. It’s designed to kill desire and deprogram the viewer’s appetite. Linklater — who, along with Steven Soderbergh and Gus Van Sant, has staked out a particular outpost on the indie-studio…

Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan is funnier than its malapropic title — the audience with whom I saw the movie wasn’t laughing so much as howling — and even more difficult to parse. Eyes wide, face fixed in an avid grin, Sacha Baron…

The Queen is more fun than any movie about the violent death of a 36-year-old woman has a right to be. It’s also as exotic an English-language picture as the season is likely to bring. Directed by Stephen Frears from Peter Morgan’s script, The Queen is set in the peculiar…

Drop-dead hip or cluelessly clueless? Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, a candy-colored portrait of France’s infamous teen queen, is a graceful, charming, and sometimes witty confection — at least for its first hour. The famously shy Coppola may be an inscrutable personality, but her bold exposé of backstage royalty opens with…

No studio director was a greater hero to the Hong Kong new wave than Martin Scorsese. John Woo dedicated The Killer to him; Wong Kar-wai modeled his first feature, As Tears Go By, after Mean Streets; Taxi Driver’s rain-slicked slo-mo urban stylistics worked their way into countless lesser HK films…

weet, crazy, and tinged with sadness, Michel Gondry’s new feature, The Science of Sleep, is a wondrous concoction. The tricksy romantic narrative — in which Gael García Bernal plays a hapless, Chaplinesque madman — may be reminiscent of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which Gondry directed from Charlie Kaufman’s…

Directed by Brian De Palma from a novel by neo-noirist James Ellroy, The Black Dahlia is a true-crime policer unfolding in late-’40s Los Angeles somewhere between the neighborhoods of Chinatown and Mulholland Drive. The premise involves one of L.A.’s most notorious unsolved homicides. In early 1947, the naked corpse of…

If Superman Returns attempted to resurrect the Man of Steel as mythic hero, the season’s other Superman movie wants to disabuse us of any such childish illusions. Glamorously adult, Hollywoodland purports to part the veil on the circumstances by which George Reeves, the actor who embodied the superhero on ’50s…

Wanna knock the prez? Let’s make a show… preferably on television. Paul Weitz’s new satire, American Dreamz, imagines the Bush regime as an episode in the history of American entertainment and American Idol as the quintessence of U.S. democracy. So what else is new? The vision of America as a…