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Forget The Bonfire of the Vanities. With Mission to Mars, director Brian De Palma has reached a new nadir. Easily the worst movie to date of 2000 (although the year is still young...), Mission to Mars beats out such worthy contenders as Supernova...

When I first saw the trailer for Moonlight Mile, it raised a few red flags, but I was at least comforted by the realization that Dustin Hoffman and Susan Sarandon, the film's stars, are usually reasonably choosy about the roles they tackle. In mak...

The ghost of Mark Twain looms large over Jeff Nichols' Mud, a modern-day homage to the settings and characters popularized in some of Twain's best loved works. The protagonists in Mud, a couple of 14-year olds, are named Ellis (Tye Sheridan) and Ne...

The most inventive moment in My Favorite Martian comes during the opening sequence. A robot Mars probe is shown slowly picking its way across the barren surface of the Red Planet. When its power supply finally gives out and it grinds to a halt, t...

Gerard Depardieu's interpretation of Cyrano De Bergerac was a definitive character in modern cinema, not to mention a jewel in the crown of his career. In fact, he was so impressive in that role that the producers of the comedy My Father the H...

Despite his reputation as one of America's foremost "serious" filmmakers, Oliver Stone's name under the "director" caption does not guarantee a good movie. I learned that lesson while enduring the seemingly-endless tedium of The Doors, and was rem...

When I was a child, one of the reasons I enjoyed the Christmas season so much was the annual arrival of those endlessly-repeated television specials: Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Santa Claus is Coming to Town, The Year Without a Santa Claus. ...

It's always a tricky proposition to make a motion picture based on recent history -- and the more public the episode, the more difficult it is for the film maker to balance drama with accuracy. This is especially true when that film maker is Olive...

O Brother, Where Art Thou? is essentially Homer's "The Odyssey" by way of the Coen Brothers with an assist from Preston Sturges (the title comes from the Sturges film, Sullivan's Travels). Or, to put it another way, it's a period piece road movie ...

Whatever his faults as a filmmaker may be, Kevin Costner certainly understands the Western. Although Open Range is not on the same level as Dances with Wolves, it's a respectable effort that is only slightly marred by the unnecessarily protracted ...