Search for 2005

Trust the Man is the latest feature from Bart Freundlich, who came to many people's attention in 1997 with The Myth of Fingerprints. Since then, Freundlich's resume has been spotty but, based on the $8 million payout by Fox Searchlight for this mov...

When a director can take a reprehensible monster and, over the course of a scant 90 minutes, turn audience reaction from distaste to sympathy, that's the mark of an adept filmmaker. This occurs in Tsotsi, an emotionally honest tale of redemption t...

There's something compelling, and occasionally profound, about a well-made coming of age story. Perhaps part of the reason is that the experience, although shaded with subtle differences for each individual, is universal. Regardless of race, clas...

Two for the Money starts as a high voltage drama about the underbelly of the sports business - the multi-billion dollar gambling industry. The movie takes us into the warts-and-all world of 1-900 numbers and internet betting sites, bringing us on-...

Robert Redford on a horse roaming the wide-open countryside of Wyoming - doesn't sound like much of a stretch, does it? What is unusual about Redford's participation in Lasse Hallström's An Unfinished Life is that the actor in as unkempt as he ha...

A phrase I remember from a long-ago TV show argued: "A person is the sum of his memories." If that's the case, what's to be said about an adult man who loses his entire past in the span of one night? Does a loss of memory equate to a loss of iden...

Unleashed is two radically different movies fused into one. On their own, each of the films might have stood a chance of working, but, brought together in concert, the radical shifts in tone create a weird dichotomy that will distract and disorien...

"Give me the child until he is seven and I will give you the man." Michael Apted's The Up Series is not only documentary filmmaking at its finest, but it is an important sociological study. How many movies can make that claim? Starting in 1964,...

Now that Kevin Costner has grown too old to convincingly play a baseball star (even an aging Major Leaguer, as in For Love of the Game), he has progressed logically. In The Upside of Anger, he portrays an ex-Detroit Tiger whose life has deteriorat...

Valiant is for the birds. Arguably the blandest of the burgeoning crop of big budget digitally animated films, Valiant aims to prove that the death of traditional animation has simply pushed lackluster screenplays into the digital realm. Until re...