May 16, 2001 | Once upon a time, some impudent rascals at DreamWorks Pictures had a nifty idea: They would produce a tongue-in-cheeky animated fairy tale. Their movie would spoof…

February 5, 1988 | Filmmaker John Hughes, heretofore the poet laureate of American teen-age foibles, has a marvelous coming of age in She's Having a Baby. Until now, Hughes has been widely known,…

November 9, 2001 | I never expected to be using the words "sweet" and "sensitive" in a review of a movie co-directed by Bobby and Peter Farrelly, the cheery vulgarians…

December 11, 1998| To paraphrase the Bard of Avon himself: Shakespeare in Love is a hit, a palpable hit. At once passionately romantic and exuberantly clever, the movie imagines a William…

August 25, 1989  |  Steven Soderbergh’s sex, lies, and videotape offers everything promised in its provocative title, and much more. It is no small compliment to say this small-budget, high-profile independent production almost…

September 30, 2005 | Like most other carbon-based life forms on this planet, I have never seen a single episode of Firefly, the short-lived sci-fi TV series created by Joss Whedon of Buffy the…

December 13, 1995 | "Farce," wrote critic-essayist Stefan Kanfer, "is tragedy out for a good time. Its characters miss catastrophe by a pulse beat. What if the husband had peeked behind the…

March 12, 2004 |  As Mort Rainey, a seriously blocked author who's woozily drunk on self-pity, Johnny Depp spends most of Secret Window looking like the “Before” half of a “Before and After”…

August 9, 2002 | By turns whimsical and absurdist, Babek Payami's Secret Ballot is an engagingly understated Iranian film with the flavor of a shaggy-dog story conceived by Samuel Beckett and directed by Jim…