Manohla Dargis

Andrew Sarris once wrote of The Immortal Sergeant, a movie directed by a great Hollywood unknown named John M. Stahl: "This is the cinema of audacity to the point of madness, and yet always preferable to the relative sanity of discretion." Substitute the word criticism for cinema and you get......

Currently moviegoers can either indulge in the Holocaust kitsch of Life Is Beautiful or take in a Stephen King lesson in Nazi venality in Apt Pupil. Both films are sensationally dumb, but at least neither is selling fascism, the unintended consequence of this week's movie about Nazis, American History X......

In writer-director Gary Ross' Pleasantville, a teenage boy and his sluttish twin sister are transported - by Don Knotts, wearing a TV repairman's uniform and a crinkly leer - into the boy's favorite '50s television show, a program in heavy rotation on a nostalgia-oriented evening lineup much like Nick at......

Part One: By now, even if you've never heard of Todd Solondz or his well-received first feature, Welcome to the Dollhouse, you may be aware that the director's new film, Happiness, has been at the center of one of those imbroglios that are inevitably more important, even urgent, to people......

It is three weeks before the Permanent Midnight opening, two weeks before the MTV awards show. This morning, Stiller flew solo at a 10 a.m. Permanent Midnight press conference held for the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. ("Just me. That was lonely.") Bleary-eyed, he answered questions and posed for photographs, even......

One weekend last month, while in Toronto to publicize his latest movie, Permanent Midnight, Ben Stiller gave 35 television interviews and five roundtable interviews to approximately 30 print and radio journalists. As far as junket weekends go, it was a fairly light load: An average junket weekend for a major......

TORONTO, SEPTEMBER 14 - Midway through the 23rd Toronto International Film Festival, the big news is just how little genuine news, modest or monumental, there is to relate. The irony is, for those of us who are here neither to buy nor to sell, the absence of hype has proved......

When did American movies get so sexless? In movie after movie, it's the same: a man, a woman, discreet lighting, no bad angles; as with happy endings, orgasms are inevitable. For the most part, you'd have to go back to the '70s to find a scene in which two adults......

In How Stella Got Her Groove Back, Angela Bassett flips her braids and keeps her poise as Whoopi Goldberg all but steals the movie out from under her. If only there were something to steal. Based on a nearly unreadable best-seller by Terry McMillan, who shares screenwriting credit with Ron......

For the first 14 minutes or so of Brian De Palma's new movie, Snake Eyes, the camera swoops uninterrupted through a cavernous boxing arena, rushing through hallways and darting around corners as it tracks Nicolas Cage like a heat-seeking missile - it's a sensational opening hand. Cage, playing a mercenary......