Avatar

A visually and dramatically impressive movie spoiled, in the end by a merely coy unwillingness to lift the artificial curtain between reality and unreality

Next Stop, Wonderland, written and directed by Brad Anderson, is a charming romantic comedy with a great many funny moments, though it doesn’t quite pull everything together in its rather unsatisfactory ending. But it has an excellent beginning. Erin (Hope Davis) comes home one day to find her live-in boyfriend, Sean (Phil Hoffman), moving out…

Rachel Leigh Cook is not only beautiful but she must be the greatest actress of her generation. How else to explain the fact that she can submit to being told in the patented denasal tones of Sylvester Stallone that she is “a special girl” —and that if she forgets it she’s going to have “a…

Romeo Must Die, directed by Andrzej Bartkowiak, is a movie for martial arts enthusiasts featuring the grim and scary-looking Jet Li, allowed to play the good guy for once, as Han, a one-man enforcer of peace on rival gangs in Oakland, California. It is also a variant of the Romeo and Juliet story, as Han…

Now we know who put the “Ham” in “Hamlet.” Who else but Kenneth Branagh, whose new, four hour movie of the play is his latest bid for the title of world’s greatest actor. And world’s greatest Shakespearean director and entrepreneur to boot. Readers with long memories will remember, perhaps, my strictures against Mel Gibson’s cinematic…

An anti-traditional look at the latest in criminality which is saved — at least in terms of box office success — by its politically suspect belly-laughs