Reese Witherspoon
September 1, 2004 | Many American actresses might think twice, or even thrice, before signing on to play Becky Sharp, the upwardly mobile anti-heroine of William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair.…
Hava Kohav Beller
August 30, 1992 | Just before she began work on The Restless Conscience, her impressively researched and quietly astonishing documentary about the anti-Hitler resistance in Nazi Germany, German-born filmmaker Hava Kohav…
Take 2: ‘Rocky’ still a knockout
December 3, 2004 | Even after inspiring countless rip-offs and put-ons, not to mention a string of sequels that illustrated the law of diminishing returns, Rocky remains in a class by…
Spike Lee: Do The Right Thing
June 29, 1989 | Summertime, and the movies are easy. And that's as it should be, in the considered opinion of most Hollywood heavyweights. It's conventional wisdom, accepted as gospel: During…
Spike Lee Strikes Back at Critics
June 29, 1989 | For filmmaker Spike Lee, the best defense is an in-your-face counterattack. At the Cannes International Film Festival, where Jeannie Williams of USA Today was a conspicuously vocal…
Video Stars
July 26, 2000 | From the golden age of Hollywood studios to the twilight of the drive-in circuit, they were known as B-movies: Low-budget, high-concept genre flicks, shrewdly derivative of…
Patrick Swayze: Dancing On Top Of The World
August 19, 1987| Flashback: Spring 1983, Los Angeles. As the late afternoon sun casts lengthening shadows in the near-deserted coffee shop of the Westwood Marquis hotel, I'm talking with a very…
Gladiator
May 5, 2000 | There hasn’t been a full-blown sword-and-sandal spectacle like Gladiator in nearly four decades. So long, in fact, that most moviegoers below a certain age might hear the…
The Girl Next Door
April 9, 2004 | Risky Business is recycled as frisky glibness in The Girl Next Door , a tickle-and-tease teen-sex comedy about a straight-arrow high school senior who discovers his…
Gattaca
October 24, 1997 | In the brave new world imagined by writer-director Andrew Niccol in Gattaca, a visually arresting but dramatically uninvolving sci-fi trifle, genetically-engineered test-tube babies grow up to become…