Manohla Dargis

Photo by Clive CooteDIRECTOR BARRY LEVINSON'S NEW PERIOD MOVIE TAKES place in a Baltimore neighborhood where the Cadillacs and the humanity gleam equally bright. It's 1954, the year of Brown vs. the Board of Education, the same year Joseph McCarthy and Willie Mays were each hard at bat. Ben, the......

Photo by Frank ConnorNOT FAR ALONG IN THE NEW MOVIE THE INSIDER, after the players have been introduced and the preliminaries sketched out, there's a scene in the kind of darkened room in which Don Corleone once did business, an office paneled in wood and weighted with quiet. The scene......

A slap-happy critique of capitalism, a stroke movie for girls and boys, a romp, a satire, a dirge and a folly -- David Fincher‘s Fight Club is a film about no limits, in both its subject and its own creation. It’s about secret fraternities in which men voluntarily beat one......

French director Catherine Breillat has a dirty mind, the sort that usually gets women into trouble, jail or the bitch house, and only sometimes into the approving public eye. The relatively obscure French novelist and filmmaker, who‘s been letting her female demons out to howl for three tumultuous decades, has......

”We were sitting around in the editing suite,“ says writer-director Robinson Devor. ”It was very depressing. Things were kind of dragging, and we knew we had a longer road to go down. The phone rang, and we said, ‘Don’t even pick it up.‘ Then Joe got the call.“ The call......

Rialto Pictures/Janus FilmsPATRICE CHéREAU'S THOSE WHO LOVE ME CAN TAKE the Train opens with an image of repose, but there's barely a frame in this flamboyant, pumped-up film that doesn't seem to tear by -- half the main characters are shooting smack, but the movie itself feels like it's hopped......

RECENTLY A FRIEND MENTIONED A TRIP FROM HIS PAST, spent with friends and a woman he'd loved, and called it a Paris Trance moment, using the title of the Geoff Dyer novel to describe this preciously remembered weekend. In the Dyer book, the moment stretches across a summer when four......

Photo by Zade RosenthalIN BOWFINGER, THE MOONSTRUCK NEW COMEDY ABOUT the movie business, even the losers are beautiful. "New" in this instance is used advisedly, even ironically, because the film, directed by Frank Oz and written by Steve Martin, who also stars, is nothing if not self-consciously, waggishly familiar: A......

Photo by Ron BatzdorffIN THE SOAPY ROMANTIC COMEDY RUNAWAY BRIDE, Richard Gere plays a man whose venomous regard for women is rewarded with one of the second sex's most glittering prizes -- played, of course, by Julia Roberts. What did he do to deserve her? If Josann McGibbon and Sara......

IN THE MAKESHIFT NEW COMEDY Drop Dead Gorgeous, a group of would-be teenage beauty queens compete for a title that's costing some of the girls their lives. Set in the fabricated small Minnesota town of Mount Rose, a Lutheran stronghold barricaded by green streets and white faces, the film means......