It's a crisp fall day in Manhattan and Pedro Almodovar is explaining why his hotel room is all wrong for a movie scene, in terms of its color scheme.

"I'd never have such a unicolor setting," he says, gesturing to couch, carpet and walls - all in related shades of...

Disney has always set the standard for animation - so The Princess and the Frog arrives not just as a new animated feature, but as part of a lengthy heritage that goes all the way back to Snow White.

Still, this is Disney's first hand-drawn musical in five years,...

Rebecca Miller's The Private Lives of Pippa Lee is like a sigh of relief from a writer-director whose work has been sensitive/gloomy until now.

The film is also the first role that Robin Wright has had in ages that shows her considerable range as an actress. In particular, it allows...

I worry about the fate of The Road, John Hillcoat's film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's post-apocalyptic Pulitzer-winning novel.

It's a moving and upsetting film - quality work that deserves to be in the Oscar hunt, both for Hillcoat's work and for the shattering performance by its star, Viggo Mortensen.

But...

Richard Linklater's Me and Orson Welles is pure delight, a backstage story set in a romantic period built around a magically charismatic character.

It's also the movie that proves that Zac Efron is a real actor, not just a teen star with a solid singing voice and a dazzling smile....

It's referred to as "development hell" - that period between when a script is optioned and when it gets a green light - an endless series of notes, meetings and rewrites when the original script falls prey to the whims of all the chefs involved with creating this particular soufflé.

Like a well-crafted novel, Pedro Almodovar's "Broken Embraces" takes its time revealing its true intentions. It's an emotional time bomb, one packed with passion, color, romance and tragedy.

Set alternately in the present and the early 1990s, "Broken Embraces" ostensibly is about a blind screenwriter named Harry Caine (Lluis Homar)....

There's a tendency to always look askance at any film in which the story focuses on an African-American who is given a helping hand by a white person.

Not that there haven't been egregious examples of films in which the beneficent white person plays savior to the beleaguered black...

Carla Gugino is one of those actors whose fans believe she hasn't gotten the breaks she deserves.

She's given terrific performances in small film roles - but never got that big breakthrough part that made her a movie star. She was outstanding in a TV series (Karen Sisco) that never...

Because it's set in 206 A.D., John Woo's Red Cliff does not include a scene of two men pointing guns at each other's heads in a wild moment of mutually assured destruction.

The climax of Woo's gripping epic does feature that trademark image - men trapped in a potentially lethal...

Just when you thought it couldn't get any more stupid out there...

I read a story the other day touting a looming deal that would cast Dan Aykroyd as the voice of Yogi Bear in a hybrid live-action/computer-animated film.

The mind boggles until the head explodes.

This is so wrong...

For filmmaker Mary Mazzio, it's always been about beating the odds. And as she has shown numerous times in her life, it has less to do with talent than with desire and hustle.

"I was an entrepreneur in training and I didn't know it," Mazzio says, sipping tea in a...

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...