Movies starring Sean Penn

Hurlyburly is a talky film - the entire movie is constructed around lengthy sequences of dialogue where the characters talk and talk and talk, often saying nothing. However, because the vocal rhythms are so perfect, the words are so well-chosen, a...

Never trust a serious drama that uses a line from a Dr. Seuss book as its title. I Am Sam (inspired by a line from "Green Eggs and Ham"), despite boasting interesting character relationships, stumbles and falls because of a storyline that consiste...

The Interpreter is a cut above the average politically-based thriller. Although the events depicted in the film are fictional (as is the country in which some of the action transpires), they bear a more-than-passing resemblance to incidents that h...

I wish there were more movies like this. Licorice Pizza, Paul Thomas Anderson’s most uplifting movie to-date, may give some viewers a flashback to the days when Cameron Crowe was at the height of his powers. It’s that kind of movie: sweet and ...

30 years have passed since the assassination of San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk and, the ballot passage of California's recent Proposition 8 notwithstanding, advances have been made in the area of gay rights, although there are still many hurd...

With Mystic River, Clint Eastwood has rebounded nicely from the failure of his mediocre previous effort, Blood Work. Absent from the screen but behind the camera for the first time since Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, Eastwood concentrat...

One could make a compelling argument that The Secret Life of Walter Mitty does what a good remake should do: it takes the essential premise of the original and, while retaining some of the names and touchstones of its predecessor, moves in a new di...

At its least, Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life is an ambitious slice of cinema by a major filmmaker. Striving for no less than the pinnacle of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Tree of Life falls short of masterful but retains a power ...

Barry Levinson's Wag the Dog was as pointed, funny, and intelligent a political satire as there has been in the last 15 years. Now, with Robert De Niro once again on board, Levinson has turned his camera toward his own backyard. What Just Happene...