Manohla Dargis

Photo by Melissa Mosely High Fidelity, the new movie from director Stephen Frears and starring John Cusack, is about how hard it is for guys to be adults. Not boiler-room warriors, Maxim thumb-suckers or the denizens of West Hollywood, but regular-Joe straight guys who, having arrived in their mid-30s, are......

Roman Polanski‘s irrelevance has seemed a sure thing for some time now. Chinatown, after all, was released 26 years ago, and The Tenant, his last film fully sustained in both tone and what might be called authorial purpose, is 24 years old. Given the Chinatown legend, it seems perverse that......

IN THE UNFUNNY NEW COMEDY WHAT PLANET ARE You From?, directed by Mike Nichols and co-written by comedian Garry Shandling, the big joke is: What if men really were from Mars? The nominal punch line is that they'd have no penises -- they'd be dickless. In what should be the......

In the unfunny new comedy What Planet Are You From?, directed by Mike Nichols and co-written by comedian Garry Shandling, the big joke is: What if men really were from Mars? The nominal punch line is that they’d have no penises -- they‘d be dickless. In what should be the......

in the new movie from curtis hanson -- a reworking of a novel light-years removed from L.A. Confidential, the director‘s last inspired adaptation -- Michael Douglas plays a rumpled writing professor named Grady Tripp. A dedicated doper and inveterate lover of wrong women, Tripp is lazily, rather uneasily huddled in......

The King and I without Rodgers and Hammerstein, much less Deborah Kerr -- what will they think of next? Oklahoma! without the corn? Misplaced nostalgia aside, the original musical about the king of Siam and the starched English governess who came to teach his abundance of children was not one......

Photo by Demmie ToddIT TAKES NERVE TO POKE FUN AT Bertolt Brecht and Orson Welles, but if you're Tim Robbins it apparently doesn't take much effort. Robbins has written and directed a splashy new movie called Cradle Will Rock, trumpeted as a "mostly true" account of the furor that greeted......

Neil Jordan‘s take on the Graham Greene novel The End of the Affair is so beautiful in looks and tasteful in sentiment that it’s hard not to think the novelist and onetime film critic would have hated it. Or at least graced the director with a withering comment or two......

Photo by Christine PlenusROSETTA, THE TOUGH, FEROCIOUSLY UNsentimental movie from Belgian filmmakers Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne, has been getting a bad rap from some of this country's critics since it screened at the New York Film Festival in September. Named for the equally tough, desperately poor 17-year-old girl who steamrolls......