POSTED // Jun 11,2007 - It’s the spring of 1945. Berlin has been reduced to rubble, the Russians are overrunning the city, 10-year-old kids are fighting alongside soldiers in the streets, ordinary Germans are turning on one another with a desperate viciousness. The once-proud...

POSTED // Jun 11,2007 - Please pay close attention, irate-letter-writers-in-waiting: It is possible to be foursquare against the ongoing barbarism of ritual genital mutilation, and still not think Moolaadé is a great movie. I’m sorry to speak to you in this manner, but...

POSTED // Jun 11,2007 - If I could travel back in time, here?s what I?d say to The Jacket?s director John Maybury and screenwriter Massy Tajedin: There are two ways to make a time-travel thriller that isn?t a complete waste of time. If you aim high, you can dig into the causality...

POSTED // Jun 11,2007 - In the grand tradition of nonalcoholic beer, four-cylinder sports cars, the Spice Channel and sky diving with an instructor clinging to your back like a remora, Cursed is the latest entry in a burgeoning subgenre: horror movies that aren’t scary,...

POSTED // Jun 11,2007 - There’s nothing wrong with trying to inject some solemnity and sophistication into an action movie. But if you don’t do it right, you end up with Hostage. It’s a movie that behaves like a petulant teenager who wants to be seen as a grown-up...

POSTED // Jun 11,2007 - If ever a movie seemed immune to criticism, it’s Born Into Brothels, the Best Documentary winner at last month’s Oscars. To a Western audience, it’s about the saddest people in one of the saddest places on Earth: the children of sex...

POSTED // Jun 11,2007 - The Manhattan in which Hitch takes place doesn’t exist in reality. This is the twinkly, fairy-tale Manhattan of a thousand movies that fancy themselves urbane romantic comedies, all bustling streets and glowing skylines and walks through Central...

POSTED // Jun 11,2007 - We’re just about at the point where everybody wants to kill Sean Penn, aren’t we? Every once in a while, actors climb to an apex of ego, ripening at a cultural saturation point where they just can no longer be tolerated. They become so engorged...

POSTED // Jun 11,2007 - Ramón Sampedro (Javier Bardem) may be a quadriplegic, but he sure smiles a lot. He makes dark-humored jokes about his own condition, teasing visitors and caretakers. Ramón says that his behavior is meant to put others at ease, and it’s clear that—28...

POSTED // Jun 11,2007 - For a guy who’s supposed to be the embodiment of artistic eccentricity, Crispin Glover sure sounds like the most pragmatic entrepreneur in the world. How does he view the end of his 10-year odyssey to complete his freaky feature film, Crispin Hellion...