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...

I'm not ashamed to say that Soupy Sales was one of the formative influences on my sense of humor as a preteen and adolescent, along with Rocky & Bullwinkle and the early years of Mad magazine. So I was sad to hear of his death yesterday.

As a youth living...

"I want to be free -- to be a vagabond of the air," Amelia Earhart (Hilary Swank) tells her future husband, George Putnam (Richard Gere), when he proposes marriage early on in Mira Nair's Amelia.

Yet there she is, shackled to Earth in this stilted, corny biopic, a movie so...

Everybody wants a bite of the vampire craze - Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant is no exception. It's also unexceptional, a bloodless film more dead than undead.

Based on a series of books by British writer Darren Shan that apparently were written for teens, Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's...

So I'm sitting in a screening room at noon of a recent weekday, watching Tony Jaa kick huge quantities of ass in Ong-Bak 2: The Beginning and thinking, This is too much fun to be considered work.

No, Ong-Bak 2 isn't a great movie and, no, Tony Jaa isn't a...

Something interesting happens about halfway through Katherine Dieckmann's Motherhood: It's as if the film turns a corner or turns a page - and figures out what it's really about.

Up to that point, Motherhood is trying - and not particularly successfully, it seems - to be a glib comedy sending...

Somehow, a shovel seems a more appropriate implement for dealing with Lars von Trier's Antichrist than any sort of writing utensil.

While some critics describe the film as vile and disgusting, that sort of moral judgment seems beside the point when dealing with a bullshit artist like von Trier. Certainly...

"Is art the thing itself? Or is it the idea of the thing?"

That question, voiced by one of the characters, would seem to be the heart and soul of Jonathan Parker's (Untitled), which opens in limited release Friday (10.23.09). A laugh-out-loud satire with a dry-martini wit, (Untitled) manages the...