A Good Woman, Mike Barker’s adaptation of the Oscar Wilde play Lady Windermere’s Fan, has been gathering dust for some time. It played the Toronto Film Festival in the fall of 2004 before opening in 2005 in every country in the world except this one. Such dawdling doesn’t bode well…

Albert Brooks, the once-funny comic turned filmmaker, plays a once-funny comic turned filmmaker named Albert Brooks in Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World, which he also wrote and directed. It’s the second time Brooks has played himself, more or less; the first was in 1979, when he made Real…

The critical consensus has Match Point as Woody Allen’s finest film since . . . oh, let’s see . . . Bullets Over Broadway, is it? Or perhaps Deconstructing Harry? Or maybe Sweet and Lowdown? One forgets where the good stuff left off, because there’s been so much bad stuff…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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 –…

Buck Henry walks into a studio boss’s office and pitches him a movie. Says it’s gonna be a sequel to a movie he wrote called The Graduate, the beloved Mike Nichols film that starred Dustin Hoffman as 21-year-old Benjamin Braddock, and Anne Bancroft and Katharine Ross as the mother and…

Those who will sit around wondering whether Munich is the work of an anti-Israeli or just a self-hating Jew — which is to say, Steven Spielberg, who has been branded both by Israeli officials and newspaper columnists in recent weeks — give the movie and its maker far too much…

One cannot, in good conscience, describe the countless strands of plot and strains of characters skittering through The Family Stone without knowing that description merits at least a snicker. . . . Okay, all right, bellowing guffaws. The movie’s too overstuffed by half with pointless people and plot lines that…

For whatever reason, the modernized, comic redo of King Kong released exactly 29 years ago has become less the “pop classic” that Pauline Kael insisted it was at the time than a dimly remembered punch line. It barely registers with modern-day moviegoers, who remember it as a campy, eco-aware update…

Hands down (and hands down her pants, from the sound of it), the funniest bit from the summer’s raunch smorgasbord The Aristocrats was hearing Sarah Silverman tell the infamously profane family-act joke at the center of Paul Provenza’s documentary. Where Robin Williams, Drew Carey, George Carlin, and a hundred other…

Warner Bros. put $50 million into Syriana and allowed writer-director Stephen Gaghan as much time and travel as necessary to research and write his story. They’d be well advised to pony up a few extra bucks to provide filmgoers with a flow chart that connects the myriad, scattered dots that…