Hilarious vignettes of various colorful dog show entrants and their pooches add up to one of the top comedies of the past ten years. Guest's send-up of various American types include a Southern rube and a gay couple, ...

“Thief” still packs a wallop, portraying poverty’s heartless capacity to rob a father of the thing an impressionable son needs to see most —his basic dignity. Authentic location shooting all around war-scarred Rome also ...

Irresistible film brings off far-fetched premise with warmth and charm. Hanks excels as man-boy Josh, and Robert Loggia is also terrific as the toy magnate who mentors him. But it's John Heard who has a comic field day ...

A brilliant spoof of caper films like Jules Dassin's "Rififi," Monicelli's manic romp is crowd-pleasing in every way, thanks to hilarious performances from Gassman, Mastroianni, Renato Salvatori, and the rest of the ...

Lovable losers populate all sorts of Hollywood comedies, but none quite stick in the memory like Patton Oswalt’s Paul, a shlubby, emotionally stunted Staten Islander who lives at home with his mom (he’s 35) and spends ...

"Big Night" is a small joy, whose success lies in its recreation of period detail, and in bravura turns by its ensemble cast, particularly Shalhoub, who steals the picture as brother Primo, the shy, eccentric, ...

First looking back at the’80s, at the height of Hulk Hogan and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s fame, Bell offers a probing and well-balanced look at how rampant steroid use has become among athletic competitors, and why this ...

Set in 1797, and based on Herman Melville's famous novella, Ustinov's sterling big-screen version of "Billy Budd" features a memorably fierce turn by Ryan and an almost angelic one by Stamp, playing the pure, ...

Anchored by Bell's soulful lead performance, "Billy Elliot" is an intelligent, often humorous coming-of-age drama by veteran stage director Daldry about masculine prejudice and the promise of escape from grinding, ...

Melding British kitchen-sink realism with fanciful sequences that dramatize Billy's reveries, director Schlesinger got his name on the map with this brilliant satire, partly inspired by James Thurber's classic story ...

It is truly a joy to sit down with German immigrant Wilder, one of the great Hollywood practitioners, and listen to him talk off the cuff (the only way he'd agree to talk) about his experiences making classics like ...

Based on the book by Tom Gaddis, who first told Stroud's remarkable story to the world, this involving tale of a caustic, antisocial man whose prison cell becomes a veritable bird sanctuary is beautifully directed by ...

Veteran director Paul Verhoeven ("Basic Instinct") returned to his native Netherlands to film this riveting World War II adventure thriller, which seamlessly merges a Holocaust survival tale with breathless, ...

Three years before the release of John Carpenter's "Halloween" brought the term "slasher film" into our movie lexicon, Bob Clark (the director of "Porky's"!) helmed this Canadian-made psycho thriller starring Hussey, ...

Based on a story by writer-director Ousmane Sembene, the great innovator of African cinema, “Black Girl” is a lean, starkly told tale about the slow emotional devastation of a stylish, illiterate maid, all revolving ...

Another great success for "Red Shoes" helmers Powell-Pressburger, "Narcissus" is an absorbing, finely acted British melodrama about the secular problems facing a new mother superior in an unfamiliar, potentially hostile ...

The dazzling ritual of Carnival is captured in a swirl of breathtaking color and kinetic energy in this enduring classic. The actors are uniformly excellent (with Dawn's Eurydice a particular stand-out), and director ...

Normally an observer of tawdry obsessives and social outsiders, Shohei Imamura (“Vengeance Is Mine”) here adapts a novel by Ibuse Masuji to explore the grim, soul-killing consequences of nuclear devastation on the ...

Master of paranoia John Frankenheimer ("The Manchurian Candidate") brings his uniquely tightly wound touch to this action thriller, which has aged surprisingly well since the '70s, the decade of overblown catastrophe ...

Part urban melodrama, part behind-the-chalkboard exposé, Brooks's "Jungle" was the first American film to deal with the "problem" of teenage delinquency and classroom anarchy in our urban public schools. In doing so, it ...