Search for Drama

Lilya 4-Ever is the third film from Swedish filmmaker Lukas Moodysson, but, in terms of both tone and content, this effort is so different from the director's other work that it's difficult to credit that all three are the product of one man. (Thi...

There is little doubt that the most discussed aspect of writer/director/editor John Sayles' Limbo will be the ending. Unconventional and unexpected, the conclusion will inspire outrage in some movie-goers (a patron at the showing I attended hurled...

Despite its share of missteps (the most egregious of which unfortunately occurs late in the proceedings), Limbo is just weird and wonderful enough to earn a recommendation. What starts out as an exercise in absurdist and surreal comedy turns i...

One of the many, many smart decisions made by director Steven Spielberg and screenwriter Tony Kushner when developing Lincoln was not to make it a traditional bio-pic of the 16th U.S. president. Instead, they confined the main story to a one-month ...

Sometimes, it is said, truth is stranger than fiction. And, as director Garth Davis has perhaps discovered, filming such truths can be more difficult than filming fiction. Lion, based on the autobiographical tale of Saroo Brierley, tells of the autho...

Lions for Lambs is one of those movies in which the principals talk a lot but don't say much. The film is built not upon characters and plot but upon ideas. That would be fine if the ideas were revolutionary or interesting, but they're fairly com...

One of my fears when watching movies about characters coping with cancer is that they will turn into Lifetime disease-of-the-week melodramas: shallow, plot-by-numbers chronologies of the disease's progression that become either manipulative tear-je...

It's not necessary to look at the color of the leaves to determine the season of the year when movies of this power come along. Little Children, the second feature from director Todd Field (In the Bedroom), is the rarest of movies - a literary mul...

It takes a deft hand to fashion a feel-good movie with plenty of laughs and an upbeat ending out of a story that includes drug addiction, a suicide attempt, a death, Nietzsche, and Proust. Despite treading through a minefield of tone shifts, co-di...

A "family movie" is often loosely defined as a motion picture that, aimed at children, is likely to bore parents to tears. Numerous examples leap to mind, most of them from Walt Disney Studios, a production company that holds the curious dist...