John Petrakis

Pedro Almodovar, the one-time enfant terrible of the Spanish cinema, has matured into one of the most sublime voices on the international film scene, and in the process has become a great ...

Spike Lee's desire to explore the nuances of black life is admirable, though the scope of his ambition has often proved to be his artistic undoing....

Roman Polanski's The Pianist has been hailed as the filmmaker's long-awaited return to the glorious 1960s and '70s, when he made such films as Repulsion, Rosemary's Baby ...

Martin Scorsese's obsession with pain and suffering--and, more to the point, martyrdom--dates back to his breakthrough 1973 film Mean Streets, whose main character repeatedly puts his hand...

To understand and appreciate the revisionist genius behind Far from Heaven, directed by Todd Haynes, one needs to appreciate the cinematic impact of Douglas Sirk (1900-1987), a  direc...

Through the decades filmmakers from assorted countries have attempted to probe the inner lives of the clergy....

While driving home after viewing Bowling for Columbine, I tuned into a radio discussion about the Washington, D.C., sniper....

Let me begin by saying that, yes, I had a big, fat Greek wedding. It was performed in the shadow of the dome of the church where my grandfather had once been priest....

Cowardice in the movies is one of those all-too-human flaws that tends to get under an audience's skin as they sit in the dark and wonder what they might do under similar circumstances....

Thoreau's line about "the mass of men leading lives of quiet desperation" could be applied to Justine Last, the lead character in The Good Girl, a low-budget morality play by writer Mike W...

The summer blockbuster Signs is a 1950s B movie wrapped up in 21st-century finery....

If there were such a thing as an American moviemaker laureate, the title would go to writer-director John Sayles....

Despite its state-of-the-art computer graphics and eye-catching special effects, Minority Report is basically a chase movie built on a question—one that Charles Dickens explored in <...

Think of a conflict between father and son, and chances are good you'll find it buried somewhere within Road to Perdition, director Sam Mendes's first film since the hugely successful, if ...

My aunt, who died earlier this year, was a woman of great strength and a raucous sense of humor....

The films John Woo made in Hong Kong were perfectly matched to the interests of young American audiences, filled with blazing guns, macho posturing and bloody climaxes....

Adrian Lyne's Unfaithful is more graphic in its portrayal of the act, but it comes no closer than most recent films to confronting the issues surrounding adultery....

A tale of redemption" is a phrase that film critics like to toss around....

While it may be coincidental that two of the most famous English-language movies of all time--Steven Spielberg's beloved E.T.--The Extra-Terrestrial and Stanley Kubrick's revered 2001:...