Michael Moore's Sicko
Christopher Hayes:Michael Moore's healthcare documentary is less partisan, less outrageous--but more real--than anything he's done before.
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Fitna's Hateful Crusade
Aziz Huq:The new film by Dutch politician Geert Wilders is the latest in a series of stunts aimed at humiliating and scapegoating Muslims.
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Photo Ops
Stuart Klawans:Errol Morris's new documentary Standard Operating Procedure lacks critical distance but produces masterful evocations of Abu Ghraib.
Film Reviews
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Panoramas
Stuart Klawans
24 City and Ashes of Time Redux, two stars of the New York Film Festival; plus Happy-Go-Lucky and Ballast reviewed.
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Burned Out
Stuart Klawans : Arts, Culture, & Entertainment
The Coen brothers' dark comedy and Godfrey Cheshire's story of plantation life.
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The Disasterplex
Stuart Klawans
Superstars and superheroes fight and flounder through Hollywood's season of wanton destruction.
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Playing Politics for Laughs
Stuart Klawans
Reviewing a homegrown war documentary, a portrait of Native American life and a pair of spy comedies.
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Twilights
Stuart Klawans
Who are films like Speed Racer, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and The Edge of Heaven really aimed at?
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Photo Ops
Stuart Klawans
Errol Morris's new documentary Standard Operating Procedure lacks critical distance but produces masterful evocations of Abu Ghraib.
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Our Troubled Youth
Stuart Klawans
Exploring the unexpected: Chop Shop, Paranoid Park, Vantage Point.
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Cool Devastation
Stuart Klawans : Reproductive Rights
American movie-goers finally get to see Cristian Mungiu's stunning 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days.
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A Hard Man
Stuart Klawans
Paul Thomas Anderson's masterful There Will Be Blood pits an oil baron against a preacher in an epic contest of wills.
2007
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Chaos, Clocks, Juxtapositions
With the release of the Dylan pastiche I'm Not There, Todd Haynes revises our cultural memory by adjusting familiar clichés.
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Grave Thoughts
Heddy Honigmann's documentary Forever visits the dead in Paris, but nobody grieves; James Mangold's 3:10 to Yuma pits an evil Russell Crowe against a driven Christian Bale.
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Stuff Happens
Reviews of No End in Sight, The Devil Came on Horseback, The Sugar Curtain and Sunshine.
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Boys (and Girls) of Summer
Live Free or Die Hard is boot camp for slackers. Knocked Up takes measure of the inadequate man.
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Anatomy of a Murder
Reviews of A Mighty Heart, Sicko, Czech Dream and Unborn in the USA.
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Good News From Romania?
12:08 East of Bucharest is a hilariously bleak film set on the sixteenth anniversary of Romania's revolution.
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Dreamscape
Reviews of the animated psychoanalytic sci-fi thriller Paprika, 9 Star Hotel and Poison Friends.
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Spider-Man 3: Third Time's (Not) the Charm
Sam Raimi has loaded so many big ideas into Spider-Man 3, they drag this morality-soaked bag of kittens right down to the river's bottom.
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Soft-Core Sexism
Lakshmi Chaudhry : Cultural Criticism & Analysis
If movies reflect our shared consensus about right and wrong, Black Snake Moan speaks volumes about twenty-first-century America.
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The Things They Carried
Reviews of The Host, The Wind That Shakes the Barley and The Namesake.
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Winter Light
Stuart Klawans reviews Into Great Silence, Sátántangó and the Museum of Modern Art's retrospective of Abbas Kiarostami's films.
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The Spy Who Loved Me
Reviews of The Lives of Others and Grbavica: The Land of My Dreams.
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Factory Girl
China Blue is a surprisingly fair-minded documentary about teenagers working in a jeans factory in China.
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The General in His Labyrinth
Reviews of Guillermo del Toro's dizzying Pan's Labyrinth and part two of Clint Eastwood's World War II opus, Letters From Iwo Jima.
2006
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Within the Context of No Context
Reviews of Blood Diamond, Inland Empire, The Good German and The History Boys.
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Unhappy Meal
Stuart Klawans : Cultural Criticism & Analysis
Stuart Klawans reviews Fast Food Nation, a film that aspires to activism as it undermines its own anticorporate message.
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Coming to America!
Stuart Klawans : Cultural Criticism & Analysis
Reviews of films from the vulgar to the magisterial: Borat, Flags of Our Fathers, For Your Consideration, Our Daily Bread and Fur.
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The Tracks of My Tears
Penelope Cruz shines in Pedro Almodóvar's Volver; James Longley's Iraq in Fragments is a repository of small truths.
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Marie Antoinette, the Upspeak Version
It doesn't matter that Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette is a dreadful film, but it is alarming that the past is increasingly seen as a place in which the most important thing of all is who's, like, famous.
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The Queen Is Dead
Reviews from the New York Film Festival, including Marie Antoinette, Climate, 49 Up and more.
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Down These Mean Streets
Martin Scorsese is one of those great artists who not only expresses emotion through film but also invents it. With The Departed, he proves why he's one of the best.
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Dead Flowers
Reviews of Brian De Palma's The Black Dahlia and Kelly Reichardt's Old Joy.
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Big in Japan
Reviews of Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles, Hollywoodland and This Film Is Not Yet Rated.
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Virtual Catastrophe
World Trade Center's hero is a tough ex-Marine who later re-enlists to fight in Iraq. But his (and Oliver Stone's) redemption narrative is soured by bad faith.
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The Magic Bus
Reviews of Little Miss Sunshine, Quinceañera, My Country, My Country, The Pusher Trilogy and The Bridesmaid.
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With Feathers
In Lunacy, order and liberty wriggle with equal parts Poe and Sade. In Scoop, recycled sleuthing gags masquerade as timely satire.
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Sea Sick
Reviews of Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, Edmond, The Motel, Gabrielle, Time to Leave and The Blood of My Brother.
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Dazed and Confused
A hallucinatory mix of animation and live action creates the Orwellian world of A Scanner Darkly; substance triumphs over style in Excellent Cadavers, a Mafia-busting documentary.
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Local Hero
Reviews of the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival, A Prairie Home Companion and The Da Vinci Code.
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Wind From the Mideast
"The Road to Damascus" explores the strange, the beautiful and the uncanny in Syrian cinema.
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Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
Reviews of four stellar films: Three Times, Art School Confidential, Lady Vengeance and Army of Shadows.
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Night on Earth
Reviews of The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, The Notorious Bettie Page and Sir! No Sir!
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Consuming Desires
Thank You for Smoking praises the professional hucksters of the cigarette companies, and Duck Season is a road movie in which the scenery doesn't change.
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The Candidate
James Carville peddles democracy in Bolivia in Our Brand Is Crisis, and anti-Nazi passions play out in Sophie Scholl: The Last Days.
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A Touch of Evil
Reviews of The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, Battle in Heaven, Blossoms of Fire and The Fallen Idol.
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The Unquiet American
Reviews of Why We Fight, Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World and Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story.
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Cruel and Unusual Punishment
Michael Haneke's Caché is a stylish thriller that scrapes away at the surface of polite European affluence to lay bare the moral rot beneath.
2005
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A History of Violence
Munich is a first-rate spy thriller featuring an assassin who reveals his soul. Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain gives two extraordinary actors time and space to develop a rare emotional interplay. Match Point puzzles with a dirty-minded energy. And Peter Jackson's remake of King Kong is true to the Depression-era original.
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Heaven Can Wait
Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life has come to be regarded as an American movie classic. But when the film was first released, James Agee, The Nation's film critic at the time, was skeptical. Though Agee praised the actors--particularly James Stewart--he cast a hard eye on the film's reflexive sentimentalizing of moral issues and heaped scorn on Hollywood's treacly idea of the life after death.
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Imitation of Art
The Chronicles of Narnia is the perfect combination of Christian allegory and The Lord of the Rings, a well-crafted commodity and nothing more. The Ice Harvest, an anti-Christmas film noir, has an unexpected depth of feeling. Memoirs of a Geisha is all prestige and promotions.
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The Best Intentions
Syriana disappoints; The Boys of Baraka documents the lives of inner-city kids transported to the wild beauty of Africa; and Punishment Park zeroes in on injustice in America.
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Agee's Gospel
Two new volumes in the Library of America series present the life and work of James Agee, whose flashes of greatness as an essayist, screenwriter, novelist and Nation film reviewer have secured his place in the American literary canon.
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Five Questions for Robert Greenwald
What motivated director Robert Greenwald to spend a year on a documentary detailing Wal-Mart's impact on American life, culture and commerce?
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About a Girl
Breakfast for Pluto is the upbeat and whimsical fable of a girl in a boy's body. Watching Claire Danes in Shopgirl will make you forget for a while that other actresses exist.
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The Young and the Damned
Stuart Klawans : Israeli/Palestinian Conflict
Paradise Now explores the bond among suicide bombers; The Squid and the Whale brings two monstrously large characters to human scale and The President's Last Bang is nastily efficient.
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Lessons of Darkness
A History of Violence examines one man's attempt to protect his family from the murderers drifting into his small Indiana town. Good Night, and Good Luck presents a portrait of Senator Joseph McCarthy to a generation that knows him only as the front end of an "ism."
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Anywhere But Here
Stuart Klawans : US Wars & Military Action
Tim Burton enlivens the dark and gloomy life of corpses and aristocrats in Corpse Bride; Occupation: Dreamland offers an unsentimental view of Iraqi soldiers.
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A Continent for the Taking
What to make of The Constant Gardener, a movie focused on Europeans set in Africa, the return of Terry Gilliam and the New York City-set Keane?
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'The Constant Gardener': What the Movie Missed
As Big Pharma increasingly turns to the Third World to test its products, this lush film will spark outrage, but glosses over the constant vigilance necessary to police drug trials.
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Shoot the Piano Player
Reviews of The Beat That My Heart Skipped, Me and You and Everyone We Know and other new films.
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Adult Content
Reviews of Madagascar, Howl's Moving Castle and several other new films.
2004
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Moore 1, Media 0
The film should make the media blush for its torpor and fake judiciousness and embedment with the Administration.
2003
2002
2001
2000
1999
1962
Can young voters stand up to suppression and swing Election 2008? Plus: Robert Fisk on the Middle East, and McCain's Russia scandal. (13mb mp3)
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