Now that the Cannes Film Festival is drawing to a close, it's clear that HBO has grown into a major film-making force beyond the small screen. Three of the well-received "Official Selection" titles--Behind the Candelabra, Muhammad Ali's Greatest Fight, and Seduced and Abandoned--are noteworthy not only for their anchor in...

If you are reading this sentence, you are probably part of the online universe into which the new film Disconnect is wired. Opening today in New York at the AMC Lincoln Square as well as the Regal Cinema on 14th Street, it depicts the Internet as a locus of deception...

I emailed Roger Ebert yesterday morning with "healing thoughts." When I got the news a few hours later that he had died, the shock rivaled the sadness. He had been living for so many years in a diminished physical condition -- but an ever-brilliant mental state -- that we almost...

Blancanieves is Pablo Berger's magical Spanish transposition of the Snow White myth into the thrilling arena of bullfighting and flamenco. Opening tomorrow in New York at the Paris as well as the Angelika, this sumptuous black-and-white silent drama is cause not only for celebration, but for reflection on why "Snow...

If numerous Holocaust-related movies from the 1970s through the '90s were directed by children of survivors, The Flat represents the cinematic efforts of the third generation -- the grandchildren of the European Jews who did not die according to Nazi plan. And if the Shoah was rarely foregrounded in Israeli...

It's hard to imagine two more wildly different films than the lowbrow American comedy The Babymakers and the French art house drama Beloved. But their imminent release reveals that Paul Schneider is one of our most versatile actors. If it wasn't already obvious from All the Real Girls, The Assassination...

Even those of us who loved the Paul Williams songs of the 1970s--like "Rainy Days and Mondays" (made famous by the Carpenters) or "Evergreen" (for which he won the Oscar with Barbra Streisand) -- didn't know that the popular artist was still alive. But a premiere screening of Stephen Kessler's...

Along with the glamor and the gushing over auteurs that dominate the Cannes Film Festival, documentaries are among this year's strongest movies in the Official Selection. In addition to Trashed -- which chronicles actor Jeremy Irons' impassioned investigation of the challenges posed by waste accumulation around the world -- audiences...

"Road movies" may be associated primarily with American film -- from The Grapes of Wrath to Easy Rider -- but the Brazilian director Walter Salles is growing into a master of the genre. In films like Central Station (1989), The Motorcycle Diaries (2004) and now On the Road, he...

It's no surprise that Philip Kaufman -- perhaps the most European of American filmmakers -- was drawn to the passionate story of Ernest Hemingway and war correspondent Martha Gellhorn. Kaufman is a consummate adapter of complex novels including The Unbearable Lightness of Being and The Right Stuff, as well as...

An earnest, boyish quality has often been half of the Edward Norton screen persona. In films like Primal Fear, Fight Club, The Incredible Hulk and Leaves of Grass, a violent or even diabolical side coexists with his innocent protagonist. But in Wes Anderson's Moonrise Kingdom -- which had its world...

Two very different Israeli documentaries are opening at New York's Quad Cinema over the next 10 days. These fascinating films have less to do with the political tensions that dominate headlines from the Middle East than with exploring personal identity. Dolphin Boy (April 27) is about an Arab teenager who...

When In Darkness was announced as one of the five Oscar nominees in the Foreign-Language Film category, many Polish people expressed effusive pride and hope, both in Poland and the U.S. It wasn't simply the prestige of an Academy Award nomination for director Agnieszka Holland, but gratification that a relatively...

The last thing a moviegoer might expect from W.E. is that the film is more Merchant-Ivory than Material Girl. Because the director is Madonna -- who will be a magnet to the media when she performs the Super Bowl Halftime Show on Sunday -- it has been easy for some...

Some American film critics are responding to the film adaptation of The Reader as if it were the tale of a Nazi guard. However, much like Bernhard Schlink's international bestseller -- to which it is remarkably faithful -- the new movie is the story of a young German man. We...