Roman Polanski has been in the news lately. Sadly, most of the attention has been directed at his battle against extradition, not his latest movie, The Ghost Writer. The new film is proof that the director has lost none of his skill in visual storytelling. It’s a political thriller that, for once, is thrilling to watch. Based on...

Tim Burton is obviously drawn to the look if not the substance of Victorian Gothic, and to protagonists relentless in their refusal (or inability) to conform. Little wonder he wanted to direct Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, a Victorian classic about a girl who flings herself down a rabbit hole into a world where the tedious logic of Western civilization is made...

Will wonders never cease? Or have the Oscars redressed their sometimes-dubious reputation by nominating an unheralded, gritty, independent war film of unlikely audience appeal—a film barely screened before being rushed to DVD and that grossed only $12 million? With nine nominations, The Hurt Locker has not only become the prestige favorite among reviewers...

The island rises like a prehistoric behemoth from the fog of Boston harbor, a rocky Alcatraz set in cold, swirling tides and accessible only by a choppy ferry ride. Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island is confined to that rock, a steeply pitched, wooded wilderness occupied by a fortress-like federal asylum for the criminally insane and the mysterious lighthouse...

Through a foggy forest of bare branches, over cold ground where twigs snap underfoot like broken bones, runs a man carrying a lantern. “Show yourself!” he cries into the darkness. Moments later the blow of an unseen creature fells him, fatally wounding him with its razor claws. The Wolfman gets off to a smashing start, and as it lopes toward its climax, it’s possible to see the film that someone must have...

The White Ribbon begins with the voice of an aged narrator recalling the rural village where he worked as schoolmaster on the eve of World War I. He confesses that the story he’s about to tell might not be entirely true. Some of the details are hearsay. However...

As the morning mist clears from the fields and the distant church bells toll, Count Tolstoy remains asleep in the Spartan room of his otherwise comfortable country house. His wife, Sofya, enters and gazes with deep concern...

The last time we saw John Travolta, he was the grinning sociopath who hijacked the subway in The Taking of Pelham 123. He continues to burnish his reputation as a cartoon-size bad man in From Paris With Love, this time as a good bad man. As the grinning...

By many standards, the artist (Daniel Auteuil) is successful, an acclaimed painter in Paris and man of many mistresses; by those same lights, the gardener (Jean-Pierre Darroussin) leads a narrowly circumscribed small-town life. When the artist returns to that town and hires a hand to tend the yard of the house he inherited, he recognizes the gardener as his long-lost childhood companion in mischief...

Imagine the dryness in your mouth, the knot rising from your stomach and the stiffness of your tongue when knocking on a stranger’s door to tell them their son or daughter, husband or wife, is dead. Your starched green Army dress sends a signal. If the stranger is next of kin to someone in the service, they might already know the content of your message before you can say, “The secretary of the Army has asked me to inform...

Will Precious be this year’s Slumdog Millionaire and sweep the Academy Awards? It’s a daunting challenge indeed. However, both films came out of nowhere and were greeted with an enthusiastic response on the festival circuit. Precious won the Audience...

Weeks after their child fell from a window to his death on the sidewalk many floors below, the married couple returns home for the first time to their toy-strewn apartment. The wife (Charlotte Gainsbourg) is the thin shadow of sorrow, clutching her bottle of antidepressants in a bony Edvard Munch hand. Glancing...

In the pair of emotionally contradictory images that open Mel Gibson’s Edge of Darkness, swollen corpses surfacing on a moonlit river are followed without pause by grainy home video of a little girl playing in the surf. A line is drawn between those images soon enough. The little girl...

The romance of being a bad-to-the-bone rambling man had long since faded into a drab routine for the ’70s-era outlaw country singer called Bad Blake (Jeff Bridges). When we first meet him in Crazy Heart, Blake is 57 and broke; he drinks whiskey like water and smokes like a dirty fireplace. Driving himself in a ’78 Silverado, he pulls into another desolate town for a bowling-alley gig he can barely finish...