Manohla Dargis

Nearly three years after it was completed, and some 10 months after it premiered in European movie theaters, Adrian Lyne's Lolita arrives on American screens with far less bang than whimper. A glum, dull, witless affair buoyed only by the minor scandal of its failure, until recently, to secure U.S......

Recently, a publicist who works at a movie studio asked me if I would fax her a quote. Earlier in the day, I'd left her an enthusiastic phone message about a film her company was releasing. My enthusiasm was genuine, and as far as I knew, nonbinding. In exchange, however,......

Calibrated for maximum impact, the action movie has become Hollywood's answer to extreme sports. Apparently, it is no longer enough to put the audience on the proverbial roller coaster; extreme movies, such as Michael Bay's The Rock and his latest opus, Armageddon, have to rattle our bones. Now, when we......

Steven Soderbergh's Out of Sight is a sexy, funny, cool breeze of a film, the kind of effortless Hollywood entertainment we haven't seen much of since Cary Grant got old. The source of this skewed romantic comedy - don't let the gun in the poster fool you - is a......

There's a scene in the big-screen version of the television show The X-Files when Fox Mulder (David Duchovny), the good-looking FBI agent with a permanent case of the heebie-jeebies, steps into a back alley, unzips and pisses on a peeling, crusted poster for Independence Day. Independence Day earned a lot......

Surely one of the most bizarre dispatches from Hollywood recently was the news that director Gus Van Sant is planning to re-make Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho. Though there's nothing new or interesting about the essential idea of remakes - even from a director such as Van Sant, once identified, somewhat quaintly......

One of the easily foretold truths about the Festival International du Film, as the Cannes film festival is properly called, is that at any time of day or night, the unfamous are in desperate search of a glimpse of the famous. During the day, thousands upon thousands with no professional......

"The hierarchy of hell is tremendously important," a woman remarks casually in the second installment of Lars von Trier's medical burlesque, The Kingdom, "rather like it is here." The character, a dotty spiritualist named Drusse, is talking about the fictitious Copenhagen hospital that gives this bravura, self-consciously recondite epic its......

PUBLIC HOUSINGDirected, edited and produced by FREDERICK WISEMANPhotographed by JOHN DAVEYFilmForum at LACE6522 Hollywood Blvd.Sunday, May 3, 7 p.m.For information, call 213-526-2911. LES MISERABLESDirected by BILLE AUGUSTWritten by RAFAEL YGLESIASFrom the novel by VICTOR HUGOProduced by SARAH RADCLYFFE and JAMES GORMANStarringLIAM NEESONGEOFFREY RUSH UMA THURMAN and CLAIRE DANESReleased by ColumbiaCitywide......

  I have been trying to get a picture that is worth reviewing, for the last two weeks, and hereby throw in the towel. — Otis Ferguson The New Republic, 1935   The postwar renaissance of cinema, which reached its height roughly between 1958 and 1964, has in the past......