Manohla Dargis

Flowers of ShanghaiThe Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien is widely considered by international film critics to be one of the greatest living directors in the world -- a prominence which, in this country, seems grounds for near wholesale neglect. If you don’t know Hou, you‘re not alone. None of his 15......

Photo by Debra Dipaolo An icon of the modern European art movie, Liv Ullmann made her first film with Ingmar Bergman when she was 27. Persona, in which she starred with the director’s former lover, Bibi Andersson, sparked Ullmann’s own short-lived intimate relationship with Bergman (never married, they have a......

People talk in Eric Rohmer‘s films -- famously, beautifully, at times maddeningly. They chatter about the weather, about art, about one another, about love, about the curve of a girl’s knee, the taste of a pastry, the earthy authenticity of a vineyard grape. Often, of course, and not only because......

Photo by Ralph Nelson Proof of Life, the new thriller with Meg Ryan and Russell Crowe, is exactly the sort of good bad movie that Hollywood does best — it’s big, worthless fun. Directed by Taylor Hackford, whose last venture was the flamboyantly tacky The Devil’s Advocate, the film hinges......

Everything happens in Edward Yang’s Yi Yi, birth, death and all points in between, and it happens just like life happens — just when you’ve settled in comfortably, think you’ve got it all figured out, something comes along to give you a jolt. The story of a modern Taipei family......

Of course, it’s terrible -- but did it have to be this bad? Drew Barrymore, Cameron Diaz and Lucy Liu are Charlie‘s newly configured Angels, post-feminist riffs on roles first memorialized by Farrah Fawcett, Kate Jackson and Jaclyn Smith. There’s no direct correspondence between the old and the new --......

With The Woman Chaser, Robinson Devor has captured the mood and eccentric tone, the surreal, bare-knuckled Weltanschauung, of Charles Willeford’s 1960 novel about a used-car salesman who tries to save himself through art. The movie is glorious pulp pastiche without the smirks, which is fitting given the author’s ironic humanism......

As if to persuade us that the recently fizzled summer wasn’t the dreariest in years, or further evidence of an industry in permanent crisis, moviemakers are launching the new season with three features about that most American of subjects: winning. Which, perhaps now more than ever before, is everything in......