Movies starring Maggie Gyllenhaal

Consequences. In real life, these ramifications emanate from every action like ripples from a stone thrown into a pond. Often in movies, especially those that feature characters who don't play by the rules, such penalties are suspended. However,...

Stranger than Fiction does a lot of things exceedingly well and almost none poorly. It takes a great premise and runs with it, neither wasting opportunities nor going off on tangents. It features strong work from both the main and supporting actors...

Turning back the calendar to the morning of September 11, 2001 is a risky proposition for any director, and not to be undertaken lightly. Paul Greengrass succeeded brilliantly with his United 93 and now Oliver Stone, never one to back away from a ...

Secretary is just your regular, garden-variety romantic comedy with heavy doses of S&M/B&D. For those used to Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks exchanging chaste kisses, the content of this motion picture is going to seem awfully far out on the proverbial li...

A few years ago, a screenwriter named Charlie Kaufman was given the job of adapting Susan Orlean's non-fiction book, "The Orchid Thief," into a motion picture script. Although Kaufman found the principal character of the book, John Laroche, to hav...

Criminal is an English-language remake of the little-known (at least in these parts) Nine Queens, a 2000 film from Fabian Bielinsky. First-time director Gregory Jacobs and his co-writer, "Sam Lowry" (actually a pseudonym for Steven Soderbergh), ha...

Monster House is, to the best of my knowledge, the first animated haunted house movie, and quite possibly the first family film to recall, at various times, Halloween, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and The Amityville Horror. (Parents, don't worry - th...

It's a rare thing when an individual performance defines an entire film, but it happens once or twice per year. Such is the case with Sherrybaby, the feature debut of Laurie Collyer. A simple tale of one woman's attempts to re-connect with her yo...

It may be fair to consider Away We Go as Sam Mendes' penance for Revolutionary Road. The director's late-2008 Winslet/DiCaprio reunion was an immersion in bile - an acidic trip underneath the placid exterior of mid-20th century suburbia to a rot t...

Crazy Heart is the country music version of The Wrestler: a grizzled veteran whose days in the spotlight are behind him struggles to keep going while seeing the world through a haze of regret and booze. The story is unremarkable; the alcoholic com...