August 25, 1989  |  Steven Soderbergh’s sex, lies, and videotape offers everything promised in its provocative title, and much more. It is no small compliment to say this small-budget, high-profile independent production almost…

September 30, 2005 | Like most other carbon-based life forms on this planet, I have never seen a single episode of Firefly, the short-lived sci-fi TV series created by Joss Whedon of Buffy the…

December 13, 1995 | "Farce," wrote critic-essayist Stefan Kanfer, "is tragedy out for a good time. Its characters miss catastrophe by a pulse beat. What if the husband had peeked behind the…

March 12, 2004 |  As Mort Rainey, a seriously blocked author who's woozily drunk on self-pity, Johnny Depp spends most of Secret Window looking like the “Before” half of a “Before and After”…

August 9, 2002 | By turns whimsical and absurdist, Babek Payami's Secret Ballot is an engagingly understated Iranian film with the flavor of a shaggy-dog story conceived by Samuel Beckett and directed by Jim…

September 20, 2002 | Sitting through Secretary is a bit like watching an explosives expert defuse a bomb. A great deal of your appreciation for what you’re seeing is fueled by your awareness…

March 26, 2004 | If at first you do succeed - well, maybe you should quit while you're ahead. Otherwise, you might make a really dumb mistake, or produce a really…

July 27, 1998 | Early in Saving Private Ryan, director Steven Spielberg recreates the beginning of the end of World War II, the 1944 D-Day landing on Omaha Beach in Normandy. Be forewarned:…

November 26, 1997 | Early in Welcome to Sarajevo, a jaded TV journalist explains the addictive appeal of covering the bloody civil war in the former Yugoslavia: "Big guns. Little children. Evil…

April 26, 2002 | How's this for an entrance? Smack dab in the middle of a blazing hotel room – or, perhaps, some lower circle of hell – an indolent trumpet player…