Elvis Mitchell
Spending time with Mexican-born writer and director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, you'd never guess that he's the filmmaker behind a series of movies known as the 'Death Trilogy.' The way he dotes on his children and talks about his wife makes it clear that he has a crackling passion for life.
Inarritu's films focus on the repercussions of a single act that draws people together and simultaneously throws their lives into chaos.
Inarritu's own nomination for Best Director for 'Babel' was the first such honor for a Mexican director.
Do you remember where you were when Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett died?
Before he became 'a working actor,' as he now proudly calls himself, Jamie Dornan initially caught the public's attention as a model - you may remember him from those greasy underwear ads with Eva Mendes, among many others.
My parents are from Hattiesburg, Mississippi, and I feel like it's an old Southern thing where people say that, as a kid, you can be an astronaut or a ballerina or a singer, but as a grown person, you need to go and get a job.
I think there are some people who have this thing where, from the very beginning, some part of them rejects convention.
In the early '60s, it was still a fairly subversive thing, though, to say that you should take a painting, cut it, set it on fire, step on it, hammer nails into it.
For years, Ono's work - musical and otherwise - was, in large part, dismissed and derided; at best, it was often misunderstood.
The director Steve McQueen has found a way to constantly include the element of surprise in his work, both as an artist and as a filmmaker.
Given how unflinching his productions have been, the 44-year-old McQueen is remarkably gentle and thoughtful - so much so that he will request a moment to consider a question, and turn it around in his head to get the shape and weight of it, before answering, occasionally with an excited rush of words in response.
The Ebert thing just didn't work out. We just couldn't, like, come to an agreement. And 'Movieline', they obviously didn't want me, because they fired me.
Can you sue yourself for plagiarism? If so, then 'Old School' has presented Ivan Reitman with a case.
What makes 'Pootie Tang' the motion picture enjoyable is its no-brow ambitions; it's a joke action film. It slides through enough African-American pop culture signifiers to raise laughs out of those who will appreciate the references; it revels in more cheese per square inch than a soul food diner.
'8 Mile' could do without an unnecessary class swipe. In a final throwdown, Rabbit clowns a competitor by revealing that the guy went to suburban Detroit Cranbrook, one of the finest private schools in the country.
The action comedy 'Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl' raises one of the most overlooked and important cinematic questions of our time: Can a movie maintain the dramatic integrity of a theme park ride?
In 2013, when it turned out that the plot of LaBeouf's short film 'HowardCantour.com' (2012) had been purloined from graphic novelist Daniel Clowes's 2007 comic 'Justin M. Damiano', the actor-director responded with a series of tweet apologies that also appeared to be shoplifted.
When an actor commits himself to a role as fully as Russell Crowe does in the grandiose and silly 'Gladiator,' you may ask yourself why and at the same time thank him for his absorption in the part.
The road back from degradation begins with self-awareness - and sometimes, as in 'Phone Booth,' change can begin with a single phone call.
Like his countryman, Kiefer Sutherland, Seth Rogen has a voice that's 10 years older than he is - a combination of world-weariness and exuberance, an instrument that he's mastered for specific comic shadings.
No actor has made a career of exerting determination to the extent that Matt Damon has. In the 'Bourne' movies, he burned himself down to a central nervous system - his focus fried away unnecessary calories.
It's more dangerous to be a friend or relative of Jackie Chan in the star's movies than it is to play the third yeoman on a 'Star Trek' episode.
It's true that as Mr. Chan makes more American movies - and gets older - we will never again see the kind of fistfight choreography that the star would devote four months to shoot.
If Mr. Chan ever makes another movie like 'The Tuxedo,' it's American audiences that will see him in court. With 'Shanghai Knights,' he has come through with one of his best. This time, it's personable.
A little of the sketch character Pootie Tang went a long way on HBO's now late, probably soon to be lamented 'Chris Rock Show.' So it's surprising how much fun the character's film debut, 'Pootie Tang,' is.
One of the best things Gwyneth Paltrow has done in years was her mesmerized, good-sport cameo in a 'Pootie' sketch, when she was melted over him like butter on an English muffin.
'Pootie Tang' may be raw and slovenly - hey, it often is raw and slovenly - but it succeeds as a laugh getter because of the spot-on satirical notes. You might say that the movie walks it like it talks it; I'm not sure what Pootie would say.
'The Third Man,' directed by Carol Reed and written by Graham Greene, is, quite simply, one of the finest movies ever made.
Often, when Jim Carrey plays it straight, all of the vitality is drained from his face; he looks like a root-canal patient trying out a pleasant expression for his oral surgeon.
One of the funniest things about Mr. Kaufman is that all of his filmed scripts - 'Being John Malkovich,' 'Human Nature,' 'Adaptation' and now 'Sunshine' - sound like titles from REM's 'Reckoning.'
'Va Savoir' is a lovable comedy about love that looks upon life as drama and uses the world of the theater as a staging device.
The director Sofia Coppola's new comic melodrama, 'Lost in Translation,' thoroughly and touchingly connects the dots between three standards of yearning in movies: David Lean's 'Brief Encounter,' Richard Linklater's 'Before Sunrise' and Wong Kar-wai's 'In the Mood for Love.'
Music is a big part of the director's life; Ms. Coppola's previous feature, a screen adaptation of 'The Virgin Suicides,' was informed more substantially by the score by the group Air than by the narrative.
The influence of John Hughes is fully felt in the melodrama 'Donnie Darko.' This first film written and directed by Richard Kelly is a wobbly cannonball of a movie that tries to go Mr. Hughes one better; it's like a Hughes version of a novel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
'Man is an endangered species,' announces one of the titles at the beginning of the sci-fi lump 'Battlefield Earth.' And after about 20 minutes of this amateurish picture, extinction doesn't seem like such a bad idea.
It may be a bit early to make such judgments, but 'Battlefield Earth' may well turn out to be the worst movie of this century.
'Plan Nine From Outer Space' for a new generation, 'Battlefield Earth' is set in the year 3000, after the beings from the planet Psychlo have conquered our planet in only nine minutes.
Adapted from the novel by L. Ron Hubbard, who cranked out sci-fi pulp by the cubic ton, 'Battlefield Earth' has the musty feel of the days when the genre's highlight was Flash Gordon.
What we're most aware of in 'Eight-Legged Freaks' is how similar it is to other movies, a recombinant mutated species itself, the product of the crossbreeding of the suffering-from-gigantism movies of the 1950s and the 1990 B-picture classic 'Tremors.'
'Eight-Legged Freaks' runs out of gas scarily fast - its one-joke premise lends itself more to a short than a feature.
Whom do you feel sorrier for: the cast of 'Boat Trip' or their children? Remember, kids can be very cruel - and this latest 'get Cuba Gooding Jr. career counseling fast' project is a misfire from beginning to end.
'Boat Trip' is more tiresome and dumb than actually bad.
'Black Hawk Down' has such distinctive visual aplomb that its jingoism starts to feel like part of its atmosphere.
Establishing mood through pictorial means is the director Ridley Scott's most notable talent. There may be no working director more accomplished at wringing texture out of the color blue than the prodigious and now prolific Mr. Scott; you'd swear that with his dazzling washes of blues and sand tones, he was inventing additional hues on the spot.
'Black Hawk Down' wants to be about something, and in the midst of the meticulously staged gunfire, the picture seems to choose futility arbitrarily.
Justin Lin, the writer and director of the teenage-wasteland drama 'Better Luck Tomorrow,' a shrewdly tense piece of storytelling, recognizes that sometimes it's good for a filmmaker to stir up trouble.
There's a great deal of echoing going on in 'Old School.' Mr. Piven, who played the upstart outsider in the 1994 campus comedy 'PCU,' has crossed over into playing the stiff martinet.
'Old School' is so breezy it could be a late-night talk show, especially when Craig Kilborn, of 'The Late Late Show,' sidles into camera range as a particularly loathsome competitor to Mitch.
In 'Windtalkers,' the director John Woo is meticulous in melding his own intimate style into the cliches of a large-scale war movie, paying homage to all the tired conventions of the genre. But it's an honor that these cliches don't deserve.