Steve A. Vineberg

Purporting to deliver the straight goods on modern sexual interactions, Closer is glossier than last summer’s similarly themed We Don’t Live Here Anymore, and it has a more impressive...

It’s by chance that Ray appears mere months after the death of its hero, Ray Charles, but it offers a needed lift for many of us laid low by the passing of the rhythm-and-blues genius....

Writer-director Mike Leigh’s Vera Drake is about a real-life figure jailed in England in 1950 for administering abortions. The film’s point of view is pro-choice....

The primary appeal of sports movies is in the way they combine the drama of competition with other genres—the triumph-of-the-spirit movie, for example, or the coming-of-age story, or the romantic c...

In M....

Adapted from one of Robert Ludlum’s bestsellers, The Bourne Identity was one of the exciting entertainments of 2002....

The best tales of the supernatural, from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, use fantasy to dramatize emotions that are too dark and overpow...

In the third Harry Potter movie based on J. K....

The German occupation of France, a sinister and embarrassing epoch for the French, tends to be treated by them with dutiful solemnity or avoided altogether....

Charlie Kaufman may be both the most original screenwriting talent to emerge in the past ten years and the most exasperating....

Mountain climbing may be one of the few modern dramatic subjects that contain the key elements of Greek tragedy: terror and folly, hubris and courage....

Though only the second feature by the Australian director Sue Brooks (and the first to open in this country), Japanese Story is an almost perfectly calibrated small work, like a finely shape...

Tim Burton’s Big Fish begins with a sentimental premise: an 11th-hour reconciliation between a dying father and his estranged son....

Peter Jackson’s adaptation of J. R. R....

Relentlessly somber, with the eruptions of teen violence rendered in a hushed style, Gus Van Sant's Elephant—his response to the Columbine shootings—is an art-...

 In Out of Time, Matt Whitlock (played by Denzel Washington), a police chief in a small Florida town, is sleeping with Ann Merai (Sanaa Lathan), his high school girl friend, now unhap...

The bedazzling first neon shots of Tokyo in Lost in Translation suggest a topsy-turvy version of Manhattan-weirdly familiar and yet alien, denser, even more vertiginous....

Dave Hurst is a dentist who shares a practice with his wife, Dana, and comes home at night to their three little girls....

For the first half-hour you can't imagine how Seabiscuit is ever going to get out from under the truly awful ideas that writer-director Gary Ross has inflicted on it....

This otherwise dim movie year has offered some spectacular documentaries....