Manohla Dargis

DID BEING CALLED A GENIUS RUIN STANLEY KUBRICK? As anyone within reach of a Time magazine now knows, the director, who was widely considered to be the world's greatest, died just days after his latest film was shown to its stars, Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, and the two presidents......

IN THE NEW FILM VERSION OF THE OLD TELEVISION series The Wild Wild West, one of America's biggest black stars stands next to a hangman's noose and jokes to a crowd of postbellum Southerners about how slavery wasn't such a big deal after all. The character, a tough U.S. marshal......

Photo by Myles AronowitzADAM SANDLER IS THE UNFUNNIEST FUNNYMAN in show business, so why is he a star? The Brooklyn-born 32-year-old has appeared in a dozen films, including Shakes the Clown, but up until a few years ago was best known as one of the unfathomable reasons why Saturday Night......

THINK OF HIM AS THE ORIGINAL PHANTOM MENACE. Harry Lime, an American racketeer with a face as wide and pale as the moon, slips through the streets of postwar Vienna like a specter. Believed dead (he's just been buried), Lime, played by the then 33-year-old Orson Welles -- genius, martyr,......

DELIRIUM SET IN SOMETIME MIDFESTIVAL. THE crowds had become a roiling, nearly impenetrable swirl into which attendees at the 52nd Festival de Cannes would fling themselves like salmon, seemingly driven by instinct and little else in an attempt to reach their collective goal, the Palais. Outside the enormous concrete mass......

HOW TO WRITE ABOUT ROBERT BRESSON? HOW TO encourage, insist even, that the reader rush out to experience -- see is somehow too puny a word -- his brilliant, rigorous, emotionally shattering films? Born in 1901, the French director (who turns 98 in September) began making films in 1934, after......

I am the knife and the wound it deals. --Charles Baudelaire GASPAR NOÉ'S PITILESS FIRST FEATURE, I STAND ALONE, COMES FROM THE take-no-prisoners school of filmmaking -- it's nasty, brutish and mercifully short. A taut, tense 93 minutes, the film relates the journey of a nameless butcher turned ex-con (brilliantly......

Photo by Bob AkesterTHE YOUNG ACTRESS REESE WITHERSPOON HAS the sort of name that sounds like a Preston Sturges whimsy, like Hackensacker, Kockenlocker, Diddlebock or Waggleberry. Witherspoon even looks like a Sturges heroine, one of those corn-fed, milk-weaned, all-American types with a pinup's body and a face for comedy. Armed......

Photo by Tracy BennettGO IS AN AMERICAN GRAFFITI FOR THE END OF THE millennium -- it's pure pop fizz. Entertaining and slight, topical and cannily familiar, this post-ironic comedy of errors involves a trio of teenage supermarket jockeys, a sexed-up drug dealer, a carload of players, some pneumatically enhanced strippers......

EDTV, THE DISARMING, DISPOSABLE COMEDY FROM director Ron Howard, is too moth-eaten to be called new -- it's a sitcom refurbished as big-screen entertainment. Its story of unlikely celebrity isn't well put together or smart, but the script by Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel is funny enough, the ensemble professional,......