The Illusionist sets an eerie, mood-altering tone right out of the gate. A man, head bowed, sits in a wooden chair on an empty theater stage as a rapt audience awaits his next move. A voice cuts t  

Quinceañera uses naturalistic acting, realistic characters and actual urban settings to present a schematically developed story that reveals itself through too much talk and not enough palpa  

Down in the Valley is a cowboy movie where all the sodbusting occurs inside a 16-year-old girl's bathing suit. But this film accomplishes way more than just a little mismatched hubba-hubba -- it   

Little Miss Sunshine, a charming yet edgy road comedy about an argumentative family traveling from Albuquerque to a child beauty pageant in Southern California, is overflowing with fine performan  

Fronted in the mid-'70s by ultra-charismatic Brazilian superstar Pelé, the New York Cosmos were the heroic ideal for Yanqui kids like myself, who were only just then learning the joys of a s  

There's a perfectly good reason why disaster movies focus on just a handful of characters. It's a way of injecting intimate personal drama into a tragedy whose enormity is so great and whose ci  

John C. Reilly has a familiar face, and not just because he's been in 39 movies over the last 17 years. He looks like the guy at the corner pub, an everyman with brown curly hair, a well-worn fac  

"The notorious one ... I'm lightbeam, no stopping me ... I am a live wildness left behind." -- Maxine Hong Kingston, My Wicked Wicked Ways There have been memorable bad girls on screen. J  

Sports films are generally disgusting celebrations of insufferable clichés. But this one took me completely by surprise: I found myself actually caring about a bunch of kids playing basketbal  

As a mystery, Who Killed the Electric Car? is far more gripping, involving and fast-moving than The Da Vinci Code. And it's a documentary, to boot, the latest in a series of provocative ones ex  

With the opening line of "Mama Said Knock You Out," the title track of his 1990 classic, LL Cool J delivered, "Don't call it a comeback/I've been here for years," an amazing knockout punch t  

Scoop finds Scarlett Johansson as Sondra Pransky, a nerdy and naive student journalist in London who's lured into the story of a lifetime. But only if she can prove that son-of-privilege Peter Ly  

The flames engulfing the Quik Stop send the world into colorful relief. For fans of Kevin Smith's Clerks, the desecration of such hallowed ground will seem unconscionable, an outright attack on   

Apologists for the categorically inadequate M. Night Shyamalan have their work cut out defending yet another cinematic killjoy from the "auteur" whose high box-office receipts do not reflect the  

Richard Linklater's films buzz with incessant talk. Whether riffing on The Smurfs, conspiracy theories, Aerosmith or Dostoyevsky, his characters yearn to express their idiosyncratic perceptions