Manohla Dargis

With Almost Famous, Cameron Crowe has made a hugely entertaining, nearly pitch-perfect film about rock & roll and the moment when, at the age of 15, he began writing professionally about bands the rest of us only dreamed about from inside adolescence. The story of an innocent coming of awkward,......

Next week, the first feature made by Joel and Ethan Coen will reopen in theaters, a non-event motivated by the release of the film on DVD. In a recent issue of The New Yorker, Ethan Coen wrote that Blood Simple is being peddled by USA Films as ”a new ’director‘s......

The Perfect Storm is a big Hollywood movie about a big Atlantic storm and the men and women who were swept up in its catastrophic wake. It’s meant to be about heroes and blue-collar heart and eternal love and all the other important lessons gleaned from James Cameron‘s Titanic, but......

In the newest comedy of bad manners from Bobby and Peter Farrelly, Jim Carrey plays a motorcycle cop named Charlie. A gentle soul with a jarhead haircut and Tom of Finland mustache, Charlie lives in a clapboard house on the coast of Rhode Island, and not long after the picture......

The young writer-director Colette Burson has a sensational idea for a movie in Coming Soon, her debut feature about three teenage girls in pursuit of self-pleasure. When we meet high school senior Stream Hodsell (Bonnie Root), she’s getting fucked for the very first time. Her partner is unworthy, as one......

The 53rd Festival International du Film, known to all save its host country more modestly as Cannes, ended not with a bang but a melancholic sigh. Wong Kar-wai’s ardently anticipated In the Mood for Love premiered the final morning of the festival and kept the promise inherent in its title......

There’s a reason why there are so many crummy movies about imperial Rome -- the men wore skirts, the violence was grotesque and the populace steeped in the sort of debauchery that Code-bound Hollywood never dared show. Historically, prohibitions on recreational purgation and rape made Rome better suited to the......

Photo by Robin HollandIt was sometime in April 1998 when Mary Harron first found out that the world’s biggest movie star was about to swallow her movie whole. Harron and her friend Guinevere Turner had written a script based on Bret Easton Ellis’ 1991 novel American Psycho, about a Wall......

Writer and director James Toback doesn’t so much make movies as peel back his forehead and invite us -- importune us, dare us, beg us -- to peek inside. For the less squeamish, the offer is irresistible. In a business notorious for reducing honest human idiosyncrasies into saleable public relations,......