During the era known as the Belle Époque, the Beautiful Age, the corsets of Victorianism loosened. A caste of courtesans, elevated above the more proletarian prostitutes, traded sexual companionship with aristocrats and magnates for lives of bejeweled glamour. Such was the milieu of Colette's 1920 novel Cheri, which reflected on an era already lost to war and upheaval...

Away We Go, a droll comedy-cum-drama by director Sam Mendes (American Beauty), perceptively explores the lives of more-or-less ordinary 30-somethings lost in a world without much meaning. Verona (Maya Rudolph) and Burt (John Krasinski)...

The enduring fantasy of older men is that a gorgeous young woman will fall in love with them, find them sexually arousing and long to imbibe their wisdom while sitting at their feet. That fantasy is the spring driving Woody Allen's often-hilarious farce, Whatever Works, and as any reader of People magazine knows, the fantasy worked for him in real life, too. But Allen has enough wit to undermine his own proposition by movie's end. Celebrity gossip hounds may wonder what the story's twisting plot says about the director's marriage to his younger...

The myth of Pandora's box gets a makeover in Night Train. So do the film noir classics The Maltese Falcon and Kiss Me Deadly, with their murderous pursuit of priceless, mysterious objects. And the cinematic references don't end there. The electric lights aboard Night Train's doomed midnight express flicker and crackle ominously, as in any good David Lynch film, as the uncanny is about to manifest itself. And the climax...

Trains have long been the setting for crime stories and thrillers. They are ideal as confined spaces in motion, roomy enough for greater interplay between passengers than the coach cabin of a jetliner. As claustrophobic enclosures making their transit through a dark underworld, subway trains are better still. Oddly, subway movies are relatively scarce, even if renditions...

Veronica's smile fades to a thin frown as her eyes meet her new daughter-in-law, Larita. As mistress of the manor in 1920s England, Veronica (Kristin Scott Thomas) had expected her son John (Ben Barnes) to marry someone suitable to his aristocratic station. Instead, he returned from a whirlwind tour of France with an American bride who races in the Grand Prix-and wins. Larita (Jessica Biel) is brash...

Nowadays, Steven Soderbergh is the hardest-working man in Hollywood. Since 2000, he has directed a dozen films and all 10 episodes of HBO's "K Street." His movies can be grouped, roughly, under three headings. First, there are his glossy blockbusters, the Ocean's series; then, art house efforts such as Solaris and Che; finally, his indie digressions, shot quickly, with digital cameras, in the shadow...

Valentino Garavani's first name was his signature, his brand and his bond. Along with Karl Lagerfeld and Giorgio Armani, Valentino was a colossus on the high couture runways, a titan of continental fashion design from the 1960s (when he dressed Jackie Kennedy) into the '00s. According to the documentary Valentino: The LastEmperor, the designer was less and less the master in his own house since the '90s and finally, with the writing of the future on the wall, bid the industry adieu. Better to walk away...

The rules in Hollywood for animated movies are that good animals come from adorable species and children are the primary audience, despite rote efforts at adult double-entendres. Social criticism is masked, muted and aimed at easy targets. Pixar Animation Studios has consistently broken the mold, making a feature starring a rat, and another where a robot discovers that the human race has declined into coddled, super-sized torpor...

If history repeats itself, then Christian Bale has a bright future in politics. After all, who pictured the original Terminator star, Arnold Schwarzenegger, in the California governor's mansion when the series debuted in 1984? Like Schwarzenegger, Bale was born outside the United States and, prohibited by the Constitution from becoming president, will never live in the White House. But with strong ties to Hollywood, could Sacramento, Calif., be the...

Gomorrah, the best seller by Italian journalist Roberto Saviano, isn't merely an investigation into organized crime in Naples. The Camorra, as the Neapolitan mob is called, is an international player, an unregulated transnational corporation with particularly bad manners, an octopus whose tentacles reach into the streets and shopping malls of America. Corruption rings the world's institutions like a scrim of toxic smog, wrapping...

Mike Tyson was formidable in the ring, a sweaty, one-man wrecking crew whose iron fists pumped like twin jackhammers. But after claiming the heavyweight crown, his fearsome reputation outside the ring began to eclipse his fame as a fighter. His first wife accused him of emotional abuse on a tabloid TV show as he sat by her side, jaws tightly set. Their acrimonious divorce played out in public. A few years later he was convicted of rape and imprisoned for three years. And that only seemed to make...

Call me old school, but Uhura has no business kissing Mr. Spock and Spock has no business enjoying her affection. True, sharp observers spotted her giving Spock the eye in the original Star Trek TV series, but a full-on eruption of desire-and in the heat of battle to save Earth from being melted into a computer-generated...

Ten years ago this month, in May of 1999, came the much-anticipated release of The Phantom Menace, Episode 1 of the Star Wars prequel trilogy. Some of the more fanatical fans of George Lucas' visionary franchise were determined to be first in line at theaters around the country-or at least among the first hundred in line. Many of them camped outside of cinemas for weeks, huddling in tents against the elements...

The opening scene, when Robert Downey Jr. hurls from his bike onto the unyielding asphalt in an accident giving rise to stitches and a swollen-shut eye, is a clue: The Soloist will be harder-edged than most Hollywood social problem pictures about helpers and victims. For one thing, as a helper, Downey is neither sap nor superman. He comes across as a savvy, skeptical journalist, a hipster in his Rat Pack hat genuinely drawn...

The world is a show and the show must go on. In movies the idea has been around at least since the musicals of the 1930s and it endures, especially as nostalgia. All the better when the show is set in the Paris of the imagination, a city of light and cobblestones, roving accordionists and sidewalk cafes, with the Eiffel Tower looming in the backdrop. Such is the appeal of the French film Paris 36, a musical-drama-comedy filmed through the scrim of old-time photography in the bygone...

With the familiar monuments of Washington, D.C., looming over a lengthening string of murders tied to politics, State of Play roams the same ground as such classic, paranoid 1970s thrillers as The Parallax View and the reality-based All the President's Men. Like the latter, the heroes are a pair of reporters, and the backdrop is an administration that gave rise to the worst fears. Although George W. Bush is never mentioned, State of Play was...

Disney and animals have been inseparable since Uncle Walt built an empire around animated ducks and mice. In 1948 the Disney studio expanded its scope with a series of "True Life Adventures" that brought drama and comedy to beautifully photographed, full-color travelogues of nature. Earth, a BBC/Disney co-production, updates those old nature pictures, with the resonant voice of James Earl Jones narrating a thematically linked...

In a bad marriage, children can become the one common interest holding the couple together. And in a good marriage, children are usually the focus, an organizing principle of their parents' lives. When the children leave, some couples feel disoriented and play for time as they regain their direction. And some marriages run out of time once the kids are gone. That could be the guiding theme of an intriguing film from Argentina, Empty Nest (El Nido Vacio). But director Daniel Burman smuggles other meanings into his story, including the sometimes-uncertain line between desire...

A girl and her dog in a worse-for-wear '88 Honda Accord trek from heartland Indiana through the Pacific Northwest for the pole star of Alaska. It's not a lark or a Kerouac road trip, but more akin to the westward push of the Joads in The Grapes of Wrath. Only Wendy faces necessity as an individual with no supporting family or memory of community, traveling into the unknown alone-except for her yellow...

In recent years John Malkovich has starred in a run of quirky little indie movies, most designed at least in part around the quirks of his haughty, disdainful persona. Being Malkovich has been its own reward, but also perhaps a trap for the talented actor. In The Great Buck Howard, Malkovich expands beyond his norm. To be sure, the familiar studied air of superiority, the supercilious glare, remain. But in The Great Buck Howard Malkovich...

In Knowing, the children of William Dawes Elementary School eagerly complete their assignment. It's 1959, and they are asked to draw a picture of the future in 50 years to be sealed inside a time capsule that will be exhumed in fall of the unimaginably distant 2009. Most of the kids draw robots and spaceships-all except Lucinda, the scared and sullen last-row-in-class child who covers her sheet of paper with row upon row of...

The U.S. House of Representatives honored Paul Newman last month. In a resolution only Rush Limbaugh could oppose, he was acclaimed for his "humanitarian works and incomparable talents." The humanitarian accomplishments came from advocacy and philanthropy. Newman plowed the proceeds from his product line of sauces and salad dressing into a foundation supporting environmental and other...

Despite being reduced to a popular T-shirt image, which is only a little better than being condensed onto a bumper sticker, Ernesto "Che" Guevara has not only survived but thrived as a symbol. A symbol of what exactly is hard to know in a society where, at least according to legend, one millennial asked another if the face on his Che T-shirt belonged to George Harrison. Likely, few of the customers of Che products (a concept...

During the 1930s small groups of Jews living in the West immigrated to the Soviet Union, convinced it was the Promised Land. They were soon disappointed. By the 1970s a massive exodus began in the opposite direction as tens of thousands of Soviet Jews quit the U.S.S.R. for Israel, the U.S. and other Western nations. But it was no easier to depart the Soviet Union than...