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 | Lost Angels in Depression-Era L.A. Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
Clint Eastwood’s [b]Changeling[/b] recalls a time before DNA testing and the scrupulous enforcement of due process in late-20s Los Angeles, when corrupt police presided over the city with something close to impunity. Consider the strange ordeal of Christine Collins.More |  | Avenging Angels Adrift in the Dark Night Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
Max Payne isn’t about to win any popularity contests. He’s a brooding, self-centered avenger with a badge, obsessively working a single cold case -- the murder of his wife and child. He greets the friendly advances of a new co-worker with an icy stare. And he’s lousy at parties.More |  | The Cowboy Who Would Be King Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars
Disgruntled voters hoping for a full-scale evisceration of the Bush administration might be disappointed by Oliver Stone’s [b]W.[/b], which treats America’s 43rd president so evenhandedly it could easily be described as sympathetic. Stone, whose liberal reputation precedes him, is a natural instigator, and there will always be those who dismiss his historical dramatizations as fanciful or worse. But even his harshest critics would be hard-pressed to deny that [b]W.[/b] is more fair and balanced than anyone had a right to expect.More |  | From a Familiar Playbook Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars
Forgive me if I approached [b]The Express[/b] with something less than breathless enthusiasm. The age of inspirational (and, some might argue, interchangeable) sports dramas has produced the stories of the first all-black starting five to win the NCAA basketball championship ([b]Glory Road[/b]) and a coach who famously benched his entire squad for getting bad grades ([b]Coach Carter[/b]), to name two. Next up: Former Syracuse running back and two-time All-American Ernie Davis, whose groundbreaking collegiate career began the season after his predecessor, Jim Brown, signed with the Cleveland Browns.More |  | In God’s Country Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars
[b]Religulous[/b] may not win many converts, but it poses an age-old question in simple, teasing terms: What if the fundamental tenets of Christianity, Judaism and Islam amount to nothing more than artful fiction? It’s a question those of great faith might be loath to consider, but it’s hard to fault comedian and professed agnostic Bill Maher for asking.More |  | True Romance Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
The best thing that can be said for [b]Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist[/b] is that it knows its audience. If that sounds like faint praise, let me explain. Teenagers in movies often fall into one of two categories: sex-crazed dopes who wind up at a wild keg party or sex-crazed dopes who wind up on the business end of a lunatic’s machete. Rare is the movie that bothers to speak their language, show some compassion for their follies and give them futures not involving the morgue or Stifler’s mom.More |  | Right Next Door to Hell Neil LaBute’s 2006 remake of [b]The Wicker Man[/b] found the director and sometime playwright’s talent for incisive, often unsettling character portraits wasted on a lumbering exercise in self-parody. His curious follow-up, [b]Lakeview Terrace[/b], returns him to more familiar territory: a world on which one man’s distaste for his neighbors’ mixed marriage leads first to petty hostilities and later to something more serious.More |  | From the Coen Brothers, a Misguided Meditation on Stupidity How depressing it is to see Frances McDormand, whose unaffected folksiness only partially masked her incisive smarts in [b]Fargo[/b], play such a grating, superficial halfwit in Ethan and Joel Coen’s latest black comedy, [b]Burn After Reading[/b]. McDormand is Linda Litzke, a middle-aged administrator at the Hardbodies gym who idles away her days dreaming of the cosmetic surgery that will reinvigorate her love life. She scours the Internet for the right man, but the dating sites are littered with losers and married types up for a fling.More |  | Disaster Movie Beyond a five-minute coffee date in Michael Mann’s [b]Heat[/b], the pairing of Robert DeNiro and Al Pacino has remained nothing more than a tantalizing possibility. (The two shared top billing in [b]The Godfather: Part II[/b], but nary a minute of screen time.) Now, as both actors enter the twilight of their careers -- without much inclination, it seems, to discriminate between good scripts and bad -- they join forces to pursue a serial killer in the turgid thriller [b]Righteous Kill[/b].More |  | A Not-So-Fine Mess Mathieu Kassovitz has seen better days. After scoring best director honors at Cannes for 1995’s [b]La Haine[/b], his gritty depiction of life on the mean streets of Paris --followed by a memorable acting turn as Audrey Tautou's beau in [b]Amélie[/b] -- the French auteur nurtured [b]Babylon A.D.[/b] for five years before watching 20th Century Fox slice and dice his footage into something painfully short on continuity and coherence. He has since condemned the project as “a terrible experience", and dismissed the film as “pure violence and stupidity.”More |
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