Arts & Culture

When your movie critics’ tastes range from Jane Austen to Rob Zombie, there’s bound to be some turbulence come award time. Perhaps not surprisingly, determining the year’s best films is something of an imprecise science here: Our top movie was anything but a unanimous pick among the five critics –…

If you go to Rotten Tomatoes, the Web site that compiles more than 100 film critics’ reviews each week, you will find at the top of the “Certified Fresh” list a single movie that was the very best-reviewed of 2005. It was not a remake or a sequel, nor did…

War is hell, but it can also be high drama. In boots-on-the-ground documentaries like Gunner Palace and Occupation: Dreamland, we got a discomfiting look at the brutal realities and moral ambiguities of America’s war in Iraq, where the death toll rises along with the administration’s rhetoric. “I want some answers,”…

Amid Hollywood’s zillion-dollar explosions and computer-enhanced trickery, plenty of quieter, better films sneaked into theaters virtually unnoticed this past year. Following are our reviewers’ favorite overlooked movies of 2005. Some of them never made it to local screens, but many have since made it to the video store: Balzac and…

Hollywood served up no shortage of literary adaptations in ’05, but only one of them — see Thumbsucker, as soon as possible — was an unqualified success. Even Andrew Adamson’s The Chronicles of Narnia, with its obviously digitized armies and its emotional disconnect from the material, was largely a disappointment…

It’s an unavoidable trend — if two movies make a trend, that is — so much so that if you Google the phrase “the return of the R-rated movie,” the first hit takes you to the tsk-tsking Family Media Guide’s article on the very topic, along with its list of…

What a difference a year makes. In 2004, Michael Moore’s Bush-bashing Fahrenheit 9/11 was not only the most-watched and most-debated doc in release, but also among the highest-grossing movies of the year. This past year’s most-watched and highest-grossing documentary was, of course, March of the Penguins, which was about as…

Until this year, nature documentaries generally found their homes at PBS and Animal Planet, enjoying modest audiences made up of children and scientists. Then came March of the Penguins, which earned close to $80 million at the box office and is still playing in some areas six months after its…

When Cedric the Entertainer makes a lousy movie, he’s delivering no less than we expect of him. But how long must we keep praising promising actors who consistently run on autopilot in mediocre crap, though we’ve seen that they’re capable of much more? Following are the top three sandbaggers of…

Social conservatives may have put the brakes on gay marriage, but there isn’t much they can do about gay movies, which arrived like some biblical flood in the last months of 2005. Along with Capote, a vivid portrait of the most celebrated gay writer of the 1960s, Ang Lee’s romantic…

Some of us go to the movies to escape into fantasy, others to cry at tragic drama. Then there are those who just enjoy a couple hours of shock treatment. Maybe it’s cathartic, or maybe it’s just sick, but it was unquestionably a good year for connoisseurs of the grotesque…

In September, UPN insisted that World Wrestling Entertainment remove the controversial Arab-American character Muhammad Hassan from its Smackdown broadcasts. One might have expected Hassan (in real life an Italian-American named Mark Copani) to resurface on USA Network’s Raw. Instead, Copani quit the business altogether to pursue movie stardom. Blame The…

The gifted Irish novelist and filmmaker Neil Jordan (The Crying Game, Michael Collins) says that his overriding concern is “how individuals work with what they’ve been given.” Case in point: Jordan’s new feature, Breakfast on Pluto. This bittersweet, gender-bending drama takes a page from Candide — its beleaguered hero, too,…

Deception, betrayal, and revenge. In his film directorial debut, acclaimed playwright/screenwriter/theater director Craig Lucas is done in by his own script, which becomes so excessively icy and cruel that it breaks, rather than solidifies, any bond it could hope to establish with its audience. A modern-day Greek tragedy — complete…

The Bombay-born film producer Ismail Merchant, who died in May at age 68 after abdominal surgery, collaborated with director James Ivory on a dozen elegantly furnished period pieces over the last quarter-century, including The Remains of the Day, starring Anthony Hopkins as a repressed English butler, three E.M. Forster adaptations…