There seem to be two kinds of documentaries about disadvantaged and troubled kids: the ones that look at the problem and make you feel angry - and the ones that examine people beating the odds and make you feel good.

Ten9Eight: Shoot for the Moon falls into the aspirational camp:...

Robert Altman's Nashville has had many imitators over the years: films that take an array of unrelated characters, then have them cross paths in the course of a day or a few days, hoping to strike sparks of friction or create harmonic resonance between people from different worlds as they...

In the United States, we take rock'n'roll radio for granted because Top 40 radio has been around since the 1950s in most parts of the country.

But as Richard Curtis' new comedy, Pirate Radio, shows, that wasn't the case in England. The government controlled the BBC and allotted only a...

Sixteen years ago, directors David Siegel and Scott McGehee rode a wave of buzz out of the Sundance Film Festival, based on their debut feature, Suture.

With the heat from their initial film as writer-directors, they began making plans for their next film - an early space-age tale about rocket...

Perhaps Fantastic Mr. Fox will be the film that convinces adults that animation isn't just for kids.

Indeed, given the sensibility of writer-director Wes Anderson, Mr. Fox is barely a movie for kids, despite its Roald Dahl pedigree. Anderson's delicious take on life and movies may amuse youngsters --...

Films about the folly of the Iraq War have been such box-office poison that it's tempting to automatically upgrade any film that shows the toll this pointless, seemingly endless conflict for what it is - as a waste of life and a burden on survivors - just for daring to...

It's been more than two years since Sean Penn cast Hal Holbrook in Into the Wild - but Holbrook is still singing his praises.

"Sean gave me the most wonderful gift," Holbrook says of the Oscar-nominated role, while sitting in a Manhattan hotel conference room on a recent afternoon. "Why...

We make millions of decisions everyday, any one of which might prove to be the linchpin of some unexpected outcome that changes everything forever. Life is full of those moments which, upon reflection, make you think: what if...? Or: if only...?

David Siegel and Scott McGehee's Uncertainty, (opening in limited...

Some bad movies you slag off gleefully. Their awfulness inspires you to reach high for insults as witty as the film is terrible.

Others provoke a certain disappointment at their failure, a kind of mourning at the difference between the film's ambition and its execution. Richard Kelly's The Box is...

Christopher McDonald admits it: "I love to work," says the 54-year-old actor, who turns up in Splinterheads, opening today (11.06.09) in limited release.

Then he shrugs and adds, "Terms like 'ubiquitous' are not good. I think I'm one of the only actors who's had two films opening against each other...

No, Grant Heslov admits, he's never had a psychic episode himself - no premonitions of the future or flash-forwards.

Nor can he engage in what those in that world refer to as "remote viewing": focusing mind-power and projecting his consciousness to watch something happening elsewhere in the world.

Part of the magic of movies is their ability to take you places you otherwise couldn't - or wouldn't - take yourself.

From the fantasy realm of extraterrestrial adventures to the life-and-death setting of a battlefield, film can teach us about ourselves by allowing us to experience the lives of...

Robert Zemeckis has been a relatively unsung innovator in the use of computer-generated and -enhanced imagery in films, in movies such as Death Becomes Her and Forrest Gump.

Perhaps the problem is that his technological advances have been shackled to underwhelming films (i.e., Death Becomes Her). His film version of...

That Evening Sun starts out as if it had been plucked from a Sundance time capsule circa the early 1990s: an elderly person raging against the indignities of old age, a rural setting, some low-key Southern humor.

But at some point, That Evening Sun, opening in limited release on Friday...

The key question about The Men Who Stare at Goats is not whether it is true (though it allegedly is).

The key question is whether it will make you laugh.

No allegedly about it - it will.

Grant Heslov's wild comedy is a delicious and funny trip through the powers...

A year later, it's a bittersweet experience watching Amy Rice and Alicia Sams' documentary, By the People: The Election of Barack Obama, which premieres at 9PM Tuesday (11.03.09) on HBO.

(Also depressing: There was a time in the not-so-distant past when a film like this - with this kind of...

Michael Jackson's This Is It elicited strongly conflicting emotions as I watched a screening this week.

On the one hand:

How can you not be captivated by this close-up immersion in Jackson's astonishing talent - as a singer, a dancer, a creator of music that is part of our permanent...

The corrosive legacy of South Africa's apartheid system is still being felt, 15 years after that country's first free elections and its move to majority rule.

To get a sense of just how deep the lingering effects of institutionalized racism must run, take yourself to Anthony Fabian's Skin, a powerful...

With Napoleon Dynamite, writer-director Jared Hess seemed to announce himself as a film-making find with an entertainingly quirky sensibility.

With Nacho Libre, however, Hess stumbled badly, creating a film that attempted to work the same faux naïf vein as Napoleon Dynamite, with a fraction of the laughs. And he wasted...

Adopting a retro filmmaking look can be an entertaining stylistic gambit (Grindhouse) or simply a nice idea that doesn't really pay off (The Good German).

Now here comes writer-director Ti West with an '80s throwback film, The House of the Devil. Set in the 1980s and shot with a sensibility...