Bill Condon may be a more capable filmmaker than Rob Marshall, but his Dreamgirls lacks the one quality that Marshall’s sub-par Best Picture winner Chicago had going for it – an invigorating, irresistible, knockout score. It’s a shortcoming attributable to the 1981 Broadway source material, and one glaringly amplified by the fact that Condon’s adaptation…

If Casino Royale is a “reinvention” of the long-decaying 007 franchise, it’s not simply because it jettisons the high-tech gadgets, tongue-in-cheek puns, and cartoonish villains that have long defined the series, but rather because it’s the first Bond film to actually prize three-dimensional characters and moral dilemmas over action-film flash. Of course, there’s plenty of…

Mel Gibson trades The Passion of the Christ’s hooked noses for noses decorated by hooks (and a character named “Curl Nose”) with Apocalypto, though don’t let that fool you into thinking that the controversial director has given up on religious mythmaking. An epic about the fall of the Mayan empire populated predominately by unprofessional actors…

Blood Diamond director Ed Zwick may as well have titled his newest action-adventure The Constant Gardener II: Diamonds Are Forever, as it peddles the same distasteful, condescending attitudes toward Africa as did Fernando Meirelles’ 2005 fiasco. Another tale of Africa’s systematic exploitation by whites and eventual liberation from such tyranny thanks to a morally ambiguous…

Possessing neither Hero’s political charge nor House of Flying Daggers’ swoon-worthy romantic roundelays, Zhang Yimou’s Curse of the Golden Flower feels a tad slight, its stab at Shakespearean court intrigue and tragedy primarily kept buoyant by hyper-ostentatious visual pageantry and the delicious hysteria of Gong Li. In a fictional kingdom in 10th-century China during the…

Naomi Watts doesn’t invoke Greta Garbo in director John Curran’s The Painted Veil, an adaptation of the 1925 W. Somerset Maugham novel that previously made it to the screen in 1934 as a glamorous Garbo vehicle (and again in 1957 under the title The Seventh Sin). That’s probably a good thing. Curran’s version remains relatively…

Karen Moncrieff’s The Dead Girl offers up a series of stories about strangers whose lives are touched by the death of a young blonde named Krista (Brittany Murphy), from the reclusive mama’s-girl (Toni Collette) who finds the corpse out in the desert, to the twentysomething (Rose Byrne) who desperately longs for closure regarding her missing…

RFK is envisioned as a rock-star Jesus sent from on-high to save America from its social and Vietnam hell in Bobby, a multi-character period piece set in the Ambassador Hotel the night of His assassination that mainly reveals writer/director Emilio Estevez’s fondness for PT Anderson and Martin Scorsese’s oeuvres. Overstuffed with tracking shots unimaginatively modeled…