“I’ve made six movies, and I feel like I’m only just finally figuring out how this business fucking works,” Paul Thomas Anderson says on an unseasonably mild August afternoon in the Astoria section of Queens, where later tonight he will preview his latest film for an invited audience at the…

It’s a warm spring evening on the Paramount Pictures lot in Hollywood, and the crowd jostling for hors d’oeuvres in the lobby of the Paramount Theater exudes the anticipatory hum of a gala studio premiere. Only tonight’s feature presentation isn’t a new summer blockbuster or year-end prestige release. Rather, it’s…

After a decade navigating Hollywood, John Woo returned to China to make his latest film, but scale back he did not. The most expensive movie ever produced in the country and also the biggest, Woo’s Red Cliff is a third-century battle royal with phalanxes of horsemen and armadas of battleships…

Once more into the breach goes writer/director Nancy Meyers to show us what women really want, this time with Meryl Streep as a Santa Barbara restaurateur “of a certain age” faced with a smattering of life-altering crises. In Meyers’ most thinly veiled work of self-portraiture to date, Streep’s Jane Adler…

A triumph of art direction over actual direction, fashion designer Tom Ford’s debut feature is nothing if not a master class in sartorial excellence, freshly exfoliated skin, and modern Southern California architecture. Based on Christopher Isherwood’s 1964 novel, A Single Man encompasses one day in the life of George Falconer…

There’s no city-clogging traffic jam in Nine, the musicalized version of Federico Fellini’s movie-about-moviemaking urtext 8 1/2, but the result feels like the celluloid equivalent of a 12-car pileup. An assault on the senses from every conceivable direction — smash zooms, the ear-splitting eruption of something like music, the spectacle…

Six decades after unleashing persistent NAACP bugaboo Song of the South (1946), that peculiar cultural institution known as the Walt Disney Co. has made a symbolic reparation by creating its first African-American princess—and plunking her down in the middle of Jim Crow-era Louisiana! For most of The Princess and the…

Given his preference for static, symmetrical, scrupulously color-coordinated and art-directed compositions, it’s less surprising that Wes Anderson has gotten around to directing an animated feature than that it took him this long to do it. Likewise, if Anderson — a nostalgia merchant whose ostensibly contemporary films always seem to be…

In her broad outlines, Claireece Precious Jones risks sounding like the epitome of ghetto cliché: an obese, illiterate 16-year-old; mother to a 4-year-old Down syndrome daughter and now pregnant again; physically and psychologically abused by her mother; repeatedly raped by her father, who is, also, the father of her own…

Seventy-one years after Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds radio broadcast snookered a gullible American public with its real-time alien-invasion scenario, The Fourth Kind writer/director Olatunde Osunsanmi tries a similar gambit, albeit with less showmanship than Welles had in his pinkie finger. Likely rushed into cinemas to cash in on…

Danish director Lone Scherfig’s An Education is a seemingly benign, classily directed year-I-became-a-woman nostalgia trip that conceals a surprisingly tart, morally ambiguous center. Based on journalist Lynn Barber’s memoir, An Education arrives in cinemas at a curious moment indeed for a movie about a headstrong 16-year-old who gives herself to…

The zombie movie — that evergreen vessel for all manner of social and political allegory — gets stripped down to its “Holy shit! Zombies! Run!” chassis in this fitfully amusing romp directed with little ambition and even less distinction by first-timer Ruben Fleischer. Set in a not-too-distant future where most…

Early in Shane Acker’s computer-animated debut feature 9, a diminutive anthropomorphic whatsit with wooden hands, copper fingers, and the titular numeral emblazoned on his chest awakens to the lifeless body of his human creator and sets forth into a decimated industrial landscape — all twisted metal and smokestacks — that…

Fatality lurks around every ceiling fan, shampoo bottle, and espresso machine in the fourth entry in New Line Cinema’s improbably long-running death-by-misadventure franchise, focused on yet another group of friends who narrowly escape a catastrophic accident only to learn the hard way that when your number’s up, it really is…

The aliens have been with us for 20 years already at the start of South African director Neill Blomkamp’s fast and furiously inventive District 9, their huddled masses long ago extracted from their broken-down mothership and deposited in the titular housing slum on the outskirts of Johannesburg. Unlike the space…

After devoting his first two films as director, The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up, to getting laid and having kids, respectively, Judd Apatow brings the circle of life to a close with Funny People, which stars Adam Sandler as George Simmons, a popular movie star diagnosed with a rare and…

Kathryn Bigelow’s Iraq War drama The Hurt Locker is a full-throttle body shock of a movie. It gets inside you like a virus, puts your nerves in a blender, and twists your guts into a Gordian knot. Set during the last month in the yearlong rotation of a three-man U.S…

Don’t let the PG rating fool you: The dark arts are back with a vengeance in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, the generally grim, occasionally startling, and altogether enthralling sixth chapter in a movie franchise that keeps managing to surprise just when one would expect it to be puttering…

As Depression-era bank-robber-cum-folk-hero John Dillinger surveys the clientele of a chic Chicago eatery in a key scene from Michael Mann’s Public Enemies, he declares: “They’re all about where people come from. Nobody seems to wonder where somebody’s going.” And much like its subject, Mann’s exhilarating movie exists in a state…

Midway through A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Dave Eggers’ solipsistic, terminally apologetic-for-being-solipsistic portrait-of-the-artist-as-a-young-slacker-messiah, the author, upon interviewing to become a cast member of MTV’s The Real World, makes the following observation about his generation of self-obsessed, media-savvy technobrats: “These are people for whom the idea of anonymity is existentially…