The pilot who brings his plane and passengers down safely in a crisis was already an old Hollywood story when Dean Martin landed his 707 in Airport. The new twist in Flight is that the harrowing aerial descent is only the

Denzel Washington is the reason to watch Safe House, an otherwise-by-numbers...

With the many problems facing the world, a strong undercurrent of apocalyptic anxiety runs through contemporary culture. The Road is the recent masterpiece of apocalypse cinema and it’s a hard trail to follow for The Book of Eli. The landscape of both movies is strikingly...

Trains have long been the setting for crime stories and thrillers. They are ideal as confined spaces in motion, roomy enough for greater interplay between passengers than the coach cabin of a jetliner. As claustrophobic enclosures making their transit through a dark underworld, subway trains are better still. Oddly, subway movies are relatively scarce, even if renditions...

Three years before 911, The Siege imagined Islamic suicide bombers bringing down buildings in New York and a repressive response by the U.S. government. Uncanny forecasting? Unlike most Americans, the team that conceived The Siege (out now on Blu-ray) had some sense for the drift of world events. A terrorist strike against the U.S., rationalized as payback for American foreign policy, was alread...

Trains have long been the setting for crime stories and thrillers. They are ideal as confined spaces in motion, roomy enough for greater interplay between passengers than the coach class cabin of a jetliner. As claustrophobic enclosures making their transit through a dark underworld, subway trains are better still. Oddly, subway movies are relatively scarce, even if renditions of The Taki...

Drug kingpin Frank Lucas is no one to mess with. Denzel Washington's depiction in American Gangster reveals a man whose fierce pride is frozen into an implacable smirk. Impervious to the heroin habit on which his fortune is based, Lucas is soul on ice. What happens when a cocky Harlem dope dealer disrespects him on a busy street corner? Lucas draws his gun, shoots him dead without blinking, calml...

In a Texas town so small that the one bench near the bus depot is reserved for whites only, an all-black college exists under the watchful scrutiny of the local authorities. In 1935, the very idea of black college graduates was a reproach to the endemic racism of the surrounding society. Wiley College is a slender tree of learning cultivated by distant Northern philanthropists. It�s the real lif...