Shohreh Aghdashloo may have the sexiest movie voice since Lauren Bacall and Elizabeth Ashley: deep, insinuating, with what she refers to as a Persian accent that's heavy on the purr.

But as she sits down for tea at New York's Regency Hotel, she has serious matters on her mind: The...

It's tempting to lump Ian Fitzgibbon's A Film with Me in It in with a comically Grand Guignol-thriller like Shallow Grave. Or the plays (and film) of Martin McDonagh.

But it would be wrong. For, while there is violence galore in A Film with Me in It,
the lion's...

When actress Bryce Dallas Howard casually mentions both her father and her son in a phone interview, it takes a minute to make the leap to -- Ron Howard is a grandfather? Opie is... Gramps?

But that's just part of the reality for Howard, 28, who stars in The Loss...

Back in November (or was it October?), when I saw the first "Best of the Decade" film list online, it came as kind of a shock. The first decade of the new century? Over already? Do I really have to organize my thoughts about films of the new century in...

Let's keep this short and simple:

Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon is a pointless, bloodless cinematic construct that seems obsessed with man's capacity for cruelty -- like almost all of his films.

In his sumptuously shot (in black and white), glacially paced story, we observe the residents of a small...

While it's traditional for critics to assemble lists of the best and worst films of the year, for some reason, I'm a lot more worked up about my list of the worst films. Maybe it's because there are so many of them that represent everything that's wrong with movies today.

I've been a Terry Gilliam fan for a long time. Though I don't think his films always work, I admire his imagination and vision - and his willingness to persevere in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds.

Gilliam, as legendary for his run of bad luck as a filmmaker as...

There are plenty of reasons to dislike Guy Ritchie's post-modern take on Sherlock Holmes, but here's the main one:

Unlike most heroes of American detective literature (Nero Wolfe being the rare exception), Arthur Conan Doyle's storied detective is not and never has been an action hero. Not that he's averse...

Nancy Meyers' It's Complicated is the kind of movie I would happily have sent my late mother to see: a little bawdy (but not too bawdy), a little naughty (but not too), funny enough, with lots of moments that would make her nod and say, "That's so true." The kind...

Queen Victoria, to most people (or at least, to most Americans), survives in the form of photos from her later years: the dour dowager whose name has become synonymous with a certain prudishness.

So the idea for The Young Victoria is an interesting one: a look...

Forget the provenance of Nine for a moment and consider it solely as a movie unto itself.

Rob Marshall's musical is a dreamy, sometimes nightmarish journey by a single man - movie director Guido Contini (Daniel Day-Lewis) - whose muse has deserted him, though its female embodiment (or the plural...

There are more sophisticated animated films out there than A Town Called Panic - but none with the sheer joie de vivre that this Belgian stop-motion-animation entry packs into 75 rollicking minutes.

The film - which opens at New York's Film Forum today (12.16.09) - is the work of directors...

Every year, one movie seems to come out of nowhere as December dwindles down - a movie that pops up just in time to unexpectedly grab all sorts of awards attention at the last minute.

This year, that movie is Crazy Heart, yet further evidence that Jeff Bridges is...

There are visionary filmmakers - and then there's James Cameron, who pushes the envelope of what is possible on the screen every time he makes a film. He doesn't do it nearly often enough.

But now here comes Avatar, the most dazzling film experience you'll have this year. Written, directed,...

The timing couldn't have been eerier, Colin Firth recalls.

It was Tuesday, Nov. 4, 2008, and Firth was filming a scene for Tom Ford's film, A Single Man, in which his character, a gay college professor in 1962, has a phone conversation about his late lover's death in a car...

There's always a challenge in adapting a novel as popular as Alice Sebold's best-selling The Lovely Bones into film form - particularly if the book also features the supernatural and has a time frame that seems particularly fluid.

After all, the book and film's narrator, Susie Salmon (Saorise Ronan), is...

Clint Eastwood's Invictus made me ruminate about the difference between great movie-making and great story-telling. I hope to go into that subject at greater length in my blog in the near future.

What struck me about Invictus was that Eastwood - nobody's idea of a flashy or innovative filmmaker -...

Tom Ford's A Single Man features one of the year's most moving performances - by Colin Firth - set against what appears to be one long perfume or underwear commercial from the early 1990s.

Never mind that the film is set in the midst of the Cuban missile crisis of...

Writer Walter Kirn tells a story about the way weapons of mass communication such as the Blackberry have made an impact on intimacy issues:

He's lying in bed with his girlfriend, post-whatever, and she takes out her Blackberry and starts checking her messages. Not to be left out, Kirn takes...

He's got a pair of IFP Spirit Award nominations under his belt -- and is guaranteed to be a player in the coming awards season.

But screenwriter Geoffrey Fletcher knows that not everyone is enamored of Precious, the film whose screenplay he adapted from the novel Push by Sapphire. Even...