The very best thing about A Dirty Shame, a giddy sex farce from John Waters, is the credits. What’s not to love about a list of characters that includes “Sylvia Stickles,” “Marge the Neuter,” “Fat Fuck Frank,” “Cow Patty,” and “Tire Lick Boy”? The soundtrack, too, bears comic fruit, with…

In Victorian England, 40,000 novels were published every year. Of the few that have endured, perhaps none is more worthy of a film adaptation than Vanity Fair, if for no other reason than this: It’s a chore to read. Clocking in at 850 pages, with frequent excursions into unrelated subjects…

Oh, Janis. Oh, gorgeous, outrageous, soul-ripping, rockin’, bluesy momma Janis Joplin. She’s a volcano. She’s a tsunami. She’s a fearless, reckless, raging American beauty. Watch her tear open her chest to reveal her hot, pulsing wounds. Watch her rage with burning, glorious light. Watch her smile that sweet Janis smile…

It’s charming. It’s hilarious. It is perhaps the most beautifully crafted, lovingly rendered portrait of extreme geekitude ever to grace the screen. It’s Napoleon Dynamite — the first feature film from 24-year-old Brigham Young University student Jared Hess — and, if there is any justice, it’s going to be huge…

The first exceptional drama of 2004 is here, and it only took, what, seven months? Perhaps unsurprisingly, The Mother comes from British writer Hanif Kureishi, who penned the gritty, South Asian-in-London marvels My Beautiful Launderette and My Son the Fanatic. On the other hand, its director is Roger Michell, lately…

Every once in a while, you encounter a person who seems to have been born under an urgent, righteous star — a person who is both a fiery activist lit with the passion of his convictions and a dramatic storyteller who naturally occupies a place in the public eye. When…

If you were a college-aged East Berliner in October of 1989, chances are that your time was occupied by one of several things. Protesting comes to mind, as does hacking at long-reviled concrete. Perhaps you caroused or lit fireworks or sang with joy as you coursed through the newly open…

Remember Omar Sharif? He’s been all but absent from the silver screen in recent years (though he has been seen — or at least heard — on television). According to the actor, he left the trade by choice: “Let us stop this nonsense, these meal tickets that we do because…

At the opening of The Fog of War, the brilliant new documentary from director Errol Morris, we see a composed, sharply groomed, middle-aged Robert McNamara preparing to brief the press on the Vietnam War. He asks two questions: First, if the chart he’s set up is visible and, second, whether…

Her bedroom walls are plastered with pinups of Rita Hayworth, Betty Grable, and Audrey Hepburn. She dresses in evening gowns, sweater sets, and silk scarves tied at her chin. Her hair is set with rollers. Her heart is set on song. Her name is Billie Golden (Isabel Rose), and she’s…