Robberies often go wrong, but the jewelry store heist at the center of Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead is about as bad as bad gets. The robber expects an easy time with the old woman behind the counter, never imagining she’d pull a gun and

Beowulf has become a watchword for unreadable. Although taught as English literature, it isn’t English as we know it, but was written down in the eighth century in Anglo-Saxon, the Germanic ancestor of our language. J.R.R. Tolkien admired the origin

In the 1972 version of Sleuth, Michael Caine played Milo Tindle, a confident young man with plenty of sap in his limbs, bedding the wife of prominent mystery writer Andrew Wyke, played with lordly disdain by Sir Lawrence Olivier. For the 2007 rendition, S

Frank Lucas is no one to be trifled with. Denzel Washington’s depiction in American Gangster reveals a man whose fierce pride is frozen into an implacable smirk. Impervious to the heroin habit on which his fortune is based, Lucas is soul on ice and

What is love, anyway? In Love in the Time of Cholera, Nobel Prize-winning novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez disentangles love from sex and casts a skeptical yet hopeful eye on the varieties of romance and the vagaries of marriage.

If we are what we eat, then most Americans are pure corn. The problem isn’t that we’re chowing down too many frozen or canned kernels. It’s the unhealthy and unnatural genetically engineered corn that factors into much of what we buy in

Jerry Seinfeld had the good sense to quit while he was ahead. By canceling “Seinfeld” as it was still rising in ratings, he probably spared its legacy from the half-life of inevitable decline, the embarrassing episodes that would have been dra

Lions for Lambs is a risky Hollywood movie in at least two senses. One, director-star Robert Redford is trying to say things that sections of the public won’t want to hear. More strongly, two: It’s a message movie about Afghanistan-Iraq at a t

In a little north-country town, canopied in bare branches and overspread with a gray blanket of winter clouds, Lars furtively darts from his home—barren rooms carved from the garage in back of his brother’s house—to drab office work and

A young film student could learn a lot from Guy Maddin. The rest of us? It depends on the length we’re willing to travel in pursuit of the Canadian filmmaker’s willfully idiosyncratic cinematic vision. To appreciate Maddin’s movies, it h

In a placid Connecticut town, with fishing boats sending ripples through the shallow harbor, a white steepled church and shingled houses rising on the terraced hills, a tragedy intrudes. Late night on a rain slick, winding turnpike, an SUV swerves to avoi

Art house films seldom spawn sequels, but Elizabeth (1998) was in any event more arty than art. It was, however, an unexpected hit—probably on the girl power principal that Elizabeth I, absolute monarch, rocked. (Never mind that Amnesty Internationa

The night-riding James Gang began as Southern rebels in the Civil War and continued as bandits afterward. Jesse James became one of America’s most storied outlaws, an original antihero in pulp fiction and the villain of newspaper editorials.

In 1942, Shanghai remained a cosmopolitan port with an international zone and foreign enclaves. The Japanese had seized the city several years earlier in their war to conquer Asia, installing a Chinese puppet regime to govern the region.

Well over a century before the invention of movie cameras and projectors, 18th-century audiences were already held spellbound in darkness by a forerunner of movies, the magic lantern shows. During the French Revolution a mysterious figure called Philidor

In the opening scene of The Darjeeling Limited, Bill Murray is the ’60s man in a gray flannel suit, impatiently checking his watch as his cab races recklessly through the crowded streets of an Indian city. Despite everything, he misses the train he

America might have been a dourer, less agreeable place without the contributions of Jewish comedians. Blessed with an outsider’s perspective and shaped by a culture that found humor in the paradox of human experience, Jewish comics from Groucho Marx

Erica Bain is a perky, middle-aged professional engaged to David, a much younger man of East Indian heritage. Besotted with each other, they go hand-in-hand one night through Central Park and walk into a dead end. The camera waits expectantly as the lover

It was a memorable weekend in the country, with laughter and conversation and the picnic table spread with bottles of wine. On the road home, Alex and Margot stop for a midnight swim in the river. Three days later, when Alex awakens from a coma, he learns

Openly borrowing from two of Shakespeare’s darkest plays, Hamlet and Macbeth, The Banquet gluts itself on vicarious human passions. Sure, it’s set in 10th-century China instead of Elsinore, but the predicament of a young, procrastinating princ

As traditional ways of life are disrupted, millions of people in the Third World are driven off the land and into the vast slums engulfing their country’s cities. Others cross borders on desperate treks, heading for developed nations and joining&mda

As the Nazis shipped millions of Jews to death camps, freight trains on parallel tracks groaned under the weight of artwork confiscated from museums, dealers and private homes from Paris to Krakow. In the midst of waging war and committing mass murder, th

Now is a dark time in the lands where civilization was born. It’s true in Iraq to be sure, but also in the Egypt of The Yacoubian Building. This award-winning Egyptian film reveals a country where everything is for sale, where intractable corruption

As the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra begins its search for the conductor who will succeed the current music director, Andreas Delfs, local classical music devotees will find special interest in Five Days in September. The documentary by Canadian filmmaker

The Western was one of America’s distinctive contributions to film and literature; Westerns were said to define the American character. Lately they have been written off for dead. Like opera, new Westerns are occasionally produced, but few enjoy muc

2 Days in Paris is the sort of film Woody Allen would make—if Woody made a movie in Paris, were still a young man and was in top form as a comedy writer. The Franco-American sex comedy was written and directed instead by Julie Delpy, familiar to art

Saddam Hussein was ruinous for Iraq, the birthplace of civilization, but in some respects the aftermath of his reign has been worse. Many Iraqis think so, and No End in Sight, the most lucid and comprehensive of the many documentaries on the misadventure,

No one knew what to call it. At first, no one understood that it needed a name. A rash of illness broke out among gay men in cities across the West during the early 1980s, claiming more and more lives until it became apparent that a new plague was upon th