The adventurous moviegoer who doesn’t mind wrestling with a little bafflement will probably find many things to admire in Wim Wenders’s The End of Violence–not least its coolly ironic title, the Germanic vigor with which it seeks to whip the causes, effects and flagrant merchandising of violence into a heady…

The fact that director Gary Fleder imposed the dismal Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead on Denver and the world is no good reason to kick his next movie in the butt. There are plenty of other reasons. For one, Kiss the Girls is a movie about a…

Okay. Drop a billionaire know-it-all, a cocky fashion photographer and a slavering Kodiak bear into the Alaskan wilderness and tell ’em to fight it out. The smart money would be on the bear (he knows the territory), but because the perpetrators of The Edge profess to be more interested in…

Small world, Hollywood. So damnably small (if not downright small-minded) that producers half-crazed by designer-brand seltzer and rampant profit motive are now starting to lift concepts for entire movies from the acceptance speeches of Academy Award winners. Case in point: The moment Scott Rudin, who’s downloaded truckloads of cash from…

In Jonathan Nossiter’s brooding Sunday, the oft-maligned borough of Queens is seen as a snowy wasteland of crumbling warehouses and lonely subway stations through which the lame and the halt wander like zombies. Just the place, Nossiter reasons, to set a psychological mystery about loss of identity and the power…

This has been a rough year at the movies for British working stiffs, but a great year for feel-good stories of their redemption. In the art-house hit Brassed Off!, coal miners cut loose from their jobs by Thatcherite economics found solace and self-respect in the endurance of the company’s brass…

For a movie so enamored of its own peculiar charms (see also: Gump, Forrest), Alan Wade’s Julian Po can exert quite a tug on the audience. It’s self-consciously “literary” and shamelessly derivative, but the germ of mystery inside it pulls you along. It’s full of ersatz gravity and precious philosophizing,…

On the basis of having played a lovably meddlesome Beverly Hills teenager in Clueless and Batgirl in the latest McSequel of the dismal Batman series, young Alicia Silverstone hasn’t quite hit full stride. There may not be much time, but she’s trying. Excess Baggage looks very much like an attempt…

The low-budget phenom of the month is a 28-year-old Los Angeleno named Miguel Arteta, whose first feature, Star Maps, comes decorated with the usual indie-hero stories about borrowed cars, unauthorized location shots and crew lunches catered by Mom. It’s also encrusted with enough tortured metaphor to sink a sophomore lit…

Director Bill Duke’s valentine to Ellsworth “Bumpy” Johnson, the king of the Harlem numbers racket back in the 1930s, is called Hoodlum. But that hardly seems appropriate. If Duke and his backers at United Artists Pictures wanted to remain true to the spirit of the piece, they would have titled…

Think Meryl Streep handled the raging white water and the redneck villains pretty well in The River Wild? Come now. That was child’s play. Still like the way La Femme Nikita blew those four-star Euro-creeps away in the middle of their pate de foie gras? Forget about it–namby-pamby, art-movie philosophizing…

It’s as old as sin, the story of the hopeless square liberated by the freethinker. It’s also as new as several current movies–including Shall We Dance?, wherein a weary suburbanite is revived by the fox-trot, and Dream With the Fishes, in which a suicidal businessman hits the glory road with…

As another indictment of the male animal and American business ethics, Neil Labute’s In the Company of Men pretty much has it all. The playwright/filmmaker claims–rather coyly, I think–that this pitch-black tragicomedy about a pair of self-absorbed yuppie buddies who hatch a plot to exploit a beautiful deaf woman for…

Out of the plain strivings of the British working and middle classes, Mike Leigh always manages to make art, even if his movies never announce themselves as such. His latest, Career Girls, is a more modest thing than last year’s superb Secrets & Lies, but he once more finds the…

If you like your summer movies indistinguishable from video games, your heroes straight out of Toon Town and, just to gild the lily, wise-cracking, clown-faced villains who chomp on pizza topped with wriggling green larvae, then Spawn might be the picture for you. Harder-edged than Spielberg’s latest dinosaur epic or…