Although he plays a college professor in his latest film, Robert Redford was, by his own admission, never much of a student, consistently more interested in what was going on outside the classroom window than inside. But there’s one moment from Redford’s academic past that burns brightly in his memory…

I gave up after about 100 pages of John Burnham Schwartz’s 1998 novel Reservation Road, a typically overwritten and contrived slice of mass-market literary pabulum that hopscotches between the points-of-view of three people — the grieving mom, the grieving dad, and the perpetrator — involved in the hit-and-run death of…

To some, the story of Christopher Johnson McCandless, the 24-year-old Emory University graduate who starved to death in the Alaskan wilderness in the spring of 1992, will never be anything more than a case of a spoiled bourgeois brat with half-cocked survivalist fantasies (and possible suicidal tendencies) who ran away…

In Neil Jordan’s new movie, Jodie Foster plays New York talk-radio personality Erica Bain, who survives a vicious Central Park mugging and becomes an urban crusader devoted to cleaning up the city — with a Glock instead of a broom. Yes, The Brave One is that movie: the one with…

By late summer, when director James Wan’s Death Sentence is playing side-by-side with Neil Jordan’s The Brave One at many of our nation’s multiplexes, moviegoers will be forgiven for thinking that they’ve traveled through a time warp and landed in the late 1970s, when first-class cinemas and seedy grindhouses alike…

Shortly after graduating from film school, I took a part-time job as the assistant to a successful movie and television director who told me I’d be handling a mix of personal and professional responsibilities. Not long after, I was put to work maintaining the good humor of the tenants at…

The latest comic meteorite to hurtle forth from the galaxy of producer Judd Apatow, Superbad is about a couple of chronically unpopular best friends who, after four years stuck on the lowest rung of the high school social ladder, find themselves invited to a legitimately cool party. Goodbye, Friday nights…

It’s a bright March afternoon on the set of Rush Hour 3, and the mood is tense. After shooting last winter on location in Paris, the production has returned to Los Angeles behind schedule and over budget. The Supermarine Executive Air Terminal of the Santa Monica Airport has been transformed…

In his big-screen debut, Homer Simpson utters the “D’oh!” heard ’round the world — or at least as far away as Washington, D.C. (which, given the unspecified coordinates of Springfield, might not be that far at all), where President Schwarzenegger and an overzealous EPA chief (voiced by Albert Brooks) rush…

Did John Waters sell out? Or did our ever-more-metrosexual age merely render him irrelevant? Certainly long before Hairspray took up residence on the Great White Way in 2002, Waters had abdicated his throne as America’s elder statesman of underground smut in favor of a more lucrative career as a neutered…

The magic has returned to the Harry Potter franchise — albeit magic of the old, black variety. The darkest and most threatening, by far, of the five Potter films, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is also the only series entry outside of the third, Alfonso Cuarón’s Harry…

“Anyone can cook, but only the fearless can be great.” So goes the personal mantra of the late celebrity chef Auguste Gusteau, whose disembodied spirit materializes, Jiminy Cricket-style, to guide the rodent hero of Brad Bird’s Ratatouille toward his goal of gastronomic excellence. He also seems to be guiding Bird,…

There is a moment in “Dead Dogs and Gym Teachers,” the 14th episode of the brilliant but canceled television series Freaks and Geeks, when gangly, bespectacled, picked-last-in-gym-class high school freshman Bill Haverchuck (Martin Starr) arrives home from school, makes himself a grilled cheese sandwich, and sits down to watch an…

The idea of “getting axed” is exploited for maximum double-entendre value in Severance, a grisly horror-comedy from the U.K. that has its tongue planted so firmly in its cheek that you half expect it to pop out the other side. Yes, heads (and, in one indelible bit, a severed foot)…

Last weekend, as Jerry Bruckheimer’s pirates were once again storming the international box office, the Cannes Film Festival (May 16-27) bestowed its two top prizes on a gut-wrenching Romanian movie about backroom abortion and a plaintive Japanese drama about a sad old man who wants to dig his own grave…

“I don’t mind if you take a shot of me eating,” says William Friedkin, between bites of an avocado sandwich, to the photographer busily taking his snapshot. “People know I do that.” Friedkin and I are downing a quick dinner in the green room of west Los Angeles’ Skirball Cultural…

Grijs Verleden (Gray Past) is the title the Dutch historian Chris van der Heijden gave to his 2001 account of Holland’s morally murky landscape under Nazi occupation, and it’s the phrase director Paul Verhoeven (RoboCop, Total Recall, Starship Troopers) uses to explain why he returned to his home country after…

This week’s generically titled studio suspense thriller, Fracture, has the good sense to begin where last week’s generically titled studio suspense thriller, Perfect Stranger, ended — with the solution to that tedious riddle: Whodunit? The answer is Anthony Hopkins as Ted Crawford, an aeronautical engineer whose pockets of money and…

There exists some debate about audience familiarity with the term “grindhouse,” and even a certain confusion about the origins of the word itself — whether it refers to the movies that comprised a gilded age of exploitation cinema or to the all-night urban theaters in which they were regularly shown…

In the same week that sees Adam Sandler playing a grieving 9/11 widower in Reign Over Me, another lone figure reeling from post-traumatic stress fills the central role in the new Antoine Fuqua-directed thriller, Shooter. Named Bob Lee Swagger and played with appropriately gruff machismo by Mark Wahlberg, he’s a…

As Charlie Fineman, a New York dentist who lost his wife and three young daughters in one of the September 11 plane crashes, Adam Sandler sports a mass of bedraggled locks and walks with his head hung low, the sounds of the city drowned out by The Who or Bruce…

Mexico City — Less than 24 hours after the Oscars capped the remarkable year of the so-called “three amigos” by handing out three awards to Pan’s Labyrinth and one to Babel, I boarded a plane bound for Mexico City and the fourth edition of the Mexico City International Contemporary Film…