Battle in Seattle (review)
I’ve never been much impressed with Stuart Townsend as an actor, but with *Battle in Seattle,* his first film as writer-director-producer, I have enormous new respect for him as an artist and storyteller.
drama
Wendy and Lucy (review)
The first great joy of this tart little portrait is Michelle Williams’s achingly contradictory performance as Wendy…
Watchmen (review)
Probably the best three-hour version of the story that could be made…
An American Affair (review)
It was originally titled *Boy of Pigs*, which captures the near-risibility of a movie that attempts to conflate the sexual awakening of one lonely adolescent with so traumatic an event as the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
Lullaby (review)
Sometimes it takes a movie like *Lullaby* to highlight what kind of treasure a really, really good actor is. Take Melissa Leo, for instance.
Open Window (review)
A counter to the onslaught of cinematic violence that typically assaults us and yet divorces us from an experience of a violent act.
Frost/Nixon movie review: all the president’s mien
This was the sort of hopeless dread the news that Ron Howard was directing this left me with. I felt like Robert Stack in *Airplane!*: ‘It’s a goddamn waste of time — there’s no way he can land this plane!’
Secret Diary of a Call Girl: Season One (review)
I imagine Piper headed straight from *Doctor Who* to a series like this to wash away that nice-girl taint before she got typecast so early in her career. And whoo, there’s no beating around the bush here. (Oo, did I just say that?)
Notorious (review)
Gives new depth of meaning to the word “hagiography.”
Defiance (review)
Just when you think that surely, by now — especially after this year of nonstop Nazi movies! — we’ve heard every story to come out of the Holocaust, along comes yet another new one.
