Sideways
Two aging men are out for a week-long adventure in the California wine country. One, a not-so-bright actor whose career has long since plateaued, is about to get married; the other, an unpublished novelist who teaches English to twelve-year-olds, is still recovering from a not-so-recent divorce. Director Alexander Payne makes no attempt to jazz up the appearance of the film, and the premises are—well—pretty conventional. Everything depends on the acting and the script...MORE

Vanity Fair
Myra Nair’s version of Vanity Fair has all the color and motion you’d expect from the director of Monsoon Wedding, and Reese Witherspoon is predictably pert and winsome in the central role of Becky Sharp. The film bubbles along in a dazzle of brief scenes, with secondary characters appearing and disappearing with bewildering regularity. There are balls, battles, catty conversations and insensitive asides, and unlike so many adaptations of English classics....MORE

Twilight Samurai
The samurai movie, like the Western, is a magnificant genre that’s not as widely appreciated as it should be. The plot is usually predicable, with romantic and didactic elements, law and lawlessness, locals and drifters, all mixed up in a sort of tense unfolding that leads to a few spectacular shoot-outs or battle scenes. But the variations are endless, and as such, these “forms” might well MORE

The Leopard
We often see films dramatizing revolutions, wars, and disasters. The subtle transfer of power between social classes makes its way to the screen less often, but that’s what Luchino Visconti brings to life in The Leopard, the film many critics consider his masterpiece. There are a few battles in the film, but for the most part Visconti’s attention is focused on the private lives of a Sicilian prince and his libertine nephew during that period in Italian history known as the Risorgimento, when the various principalities ...MORE