Steve A. Vineberg

This 1982 drama directed by Alan Parker is one of the great films of its decade—complex, adult, irresolvable, with a screenplay by Bo Goldman that poeticizes its c...

It takes a long while to assimilate Brian De Palma’s Iraq war film. It’s not so much that Redacted is raw and assaultive. It’s that the style isn’t like anything you’ve ever seen....

Fashioned from a book by Jon Krakauer, Sean Penn’s Into the Wild is an elegiac film about Christopher Johnson McCandless, who, upon graduating from Emory University in 1990, set out, without...

Neil Jordan’s The Brave One has a lacerating opening section....

The immensely exciting Bourne trilogy, culled from Robert Ludlum’s best sellers, builds to a satisfying conclusion in The Bourne Ultimatum, which ties together the arcs of The Bourne Identity...

It takes 10 or 15 minutes to catch up to the shorthand narrative style of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, the fifth film based on the J. K....

In the wake of 9/11, Daniel Pearl, Southeast Asia bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal, was in Pakistan chasing down leads to a mysterious figure named Sheikh Mubarak Ali Gilani, who he ...

Glen Hansard, lead singer for the Irish band The Frames, has a long, woebegone face pebbled with a rust-colored beard; his eyes are immense, with the peeled look of billiard balls....

If you found the first two installments of the Spider-Man series poetic, imaginative and impassioned, you’re likely to experience an unpleasant jolt at Spider-Man 3....

As an attempt to address the realities of post-9/11 trauma, Reign Over Me is so misbegotten that it trivializes the subject....

The winner of the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, The Lives of Others, looks at a political system kept in power by a police agency that has absolute power to keep any citizen ...

Devotees of children’s literature have received an unexpected lift from the nearly simultaneous release of the new film of Charlotte’s Web, based on the story by E. B....

Readers of P. D. James’s novel Children of Men won’t be prepared for the emotional breadth of the film version by Alfonso Cuarón....

Soulful and tough in equal measure, The Pursuit of Happyness is the ideal movie for the Christmas season....

The acclaimed Mexican filmmaker Alejandro González I&ntildeárritu strings together four stories from around the globe in Babel....

In director Todd Field’s Little Children, adapted from Tom Perrotta’s best-selling novel, Kate Winslet plays Sarah, an intelligent, expensively educated woman who is raising a preschool daug...

Steve Zaillian’s adaptation of Robert Penn Warren’s 1946 Pulitzer Prize–winning novel All the King’s Men, about the making of a demagogue—modeled on Louisiana governor (and later senator) Hu...

The first act of the satirical comedy Little Miss Sunshine has an affable scattershot loopiness....

Emotionally complicated and deeply compassionate, Heading South, by the French director Laurent Cantet, approaches a delicate subject—sex tourism in Haiti in the late 1970s—with a mixture of frankn...

Following in the tradition of Spellbound (about kids participating in a national spelling bee) and Word Wars (about Scrabble players), the charming small-scale documentary Wordplay...