5/12/2005
In ancient China, an undercover cop breaks a blind female warrior out of jail in hopes that she will lead him to her revolutionary faction called the Flying Daggers.
Director Zhang Yimou's films are such works of art you could freeze any scene at any time, print it, frame it and hang it in a museum. It's what gives his films an easily recognizable flair. Like other distinctive directors such as Quentin Tarrantino and Ang Lee, from the moment we see the first...
3/31/2005
A ladykiller and consummate bachelor who avoids closeness as a way to guard his emotions, discovers that while intimacy has both perks and drawbacks, it
Alfie is what every man thinks he wants to be -- a suave, lady-killer who cherishes his unattached lifestyle and lives for late-night romps with delicious women.Alfie is so confident with women, in fact, that attracting them seems effortless. They flock to him like sailors to sirens. As he says in...
3/29/2005
When her husband disappears, a suburban mother and her four headstrong daughters find the upside of anger and other ways of coping with loss.
In "The Upside of Anger," Kevin Costner's character Denny Davies says that people never really get over a significant loss, they just learn how to walk with a limp. That "education" of sorts, is what this film is all about. It's about what loss does to a person, how it scars them, changes them and...
3/16/2005
Rodney Copperbottom joins a gang of rag-tag
Animation is a hot genre these days, thanks to the phenomenal success of Pixar's multi-million dollar blockbusters "Toy Story," "Monsters, Inc," and "Finding Nemo," and DreamWorks' "Shrek." These studio giants have opened the door for other, smaller companies like Blue Sky Studios to release...
2/28/2005
The fascinating survival story of a climber, left for dead in the Peruvian Andes, who fought his way back down the mountain with three breaks in one leg.
If "Touching the Void" were a fictional film, it would have been criticized for being far-fetched. That's what makes this dramatic reenactment of endurance against incredible odds so fascinating: It really happened. Based on a book by the same name, the dramatized documentary chronicles the true...
2/11/2005
A love story is told in flashback as an elderly man reads to his love from a notebook of their romance, hoping to trigger memories for her as she struggles with Alzheimer
If people are honest with themselves, I believe most would say the best times in their lives were the days when they were utterly and completely happily in love. For most, however, the days of elated love are distant memories. But, what if you got a second chance to reconnect with the only one...
1/20/2005
A coach takes over a team of inner-city basketball players and turns them into winners, both on and off the court.
I'm always skeptical when I see ads for films like "Coach Carter" because they're so often filled with melodrama. This film, too, has moments of cliche and sensationalism, but it fights hard to keep these to a minimum and succeeds often enough to make it entertaining. Part of the appeal comes from...
1/4/2005
When a scuba tour boat mistakenly leaves two divers behind in shark-infested waters, they begin a terrifying quest to stay alive.
Three decades ago "Jaws" invaded our psyches, tapping into a primal fear so deep, its theme music still evokes goose bumps. "Open Water" addresses this same phobia, but with a twist. Where "Jaws" had men fighting a great predator from the deck of a fishing boat, in "Open Water" people fight them...
11/23/2004
An American man and a French woman, who shared an extraordinary night together in their youth, get a second chance at love when they meet nine years later in Paris.
True love peels away our layers of defenses like an onion, leaving us with both ecstatic joy and raw vulnerability. These conflicting emotions are what director Richard Linklater captures in the film, "Before Sunset." This is a sequel to the 1995 film, "Before Sunrise," but the new movie easily...
