MOVIE REVIEW: 'Letters' the better half of Eastwood's Iwo Jima set
(SH) - "Letters From Iwo Jima" is the second and better half of director Clint Eastwood's powerful twin set of films about the Battle of Iwo Jima. It's a different kind of story and a different kind of movie from "Flags of Our Fathers," which was a terrific film in its own right.
(Published 8:28AM, January 19th, 2007)

MOVIE REVIEW: Russia's forgotten children
(CSM) - The Russian director Andrei Kravchuk has a background in documentaries and it shows. His first dramatic feature, "The Italian," takes off from a crisis that hit Russian cities in the late '90s following the collapse of the banking and financial institutions. Children, many of them homeless, invaded the streets to survive. Overrun orphanages were common.
(Published 7:20AM, January 19th, 2007)

MOVIE REVIEW: 'Pan's Labyrinth' is a grand, grim fairy tale
(SMW) - The fascinating "Pan's Labyrinth" offers a fairy tale so dark and violent that it makes the Brothers Grimm look about as scary as the Smothers Brothers. Yet the film is also richly humane in its belief in the mind and heart as powerful tools against oppression.
(Published 11:52AM, January 12th, 2007)

MOVIE REVIEW: Powerful documentary examines bridge suicides
(SH) - What a sad statistic: Not a month went by in 2004 without someone jumping to his or her death from the Golden Gate Bridge.
(Published 11:08AM, January 12th, 2007)

THE MOVIE MASOCHIST: Here be dragons
(McClatchy Interactive) - If you were a cable subscriber and couch potato in the 1980s you may remember the slew of cheap sword-and-sorcery movies that ran incessantly on pay channels and basic-service networks such as USA and TBS.
(Published 1:09PM, January 16th, 2007)

MOVIE REVIEW: 'Stomp' is too little steppin' and too much waitin'
(SH) - Would it surprise you to learn I was a steppin' champion in my college fraternity days?
(Published 9:21AM, January 12th, 2007)

MOVIE REVIEW: Behind 'The Painted Veil,' a tragic love story
(CSM) - The novels of W. Somerset Maugham were pooh-poohed by the literati almost from the start, and yet they're still read - or at least adapted into movies. In fact, few 20th-century novelists have been adapted more often, and some of the productions, such as "Of Human Bondage" and "The Letter," both with Bette Davis, or "Rain," with Walter Huston and Joan Crawford, were exceptional.
(Published 7:28AM, January 19th, 2007)

MOVIE REVIEW: 'Notes on a Scandal' shows actresses in top form
(CSM) - Few pleasures are sharper than watching a pair of great movie actors duel it out for honors. In "Notes on a Scandal," Judi Dench and Cate Blanchett are having a high old time. So are we.
(Published 7:35AM, January 12th, 2007)

MOVIE REVIEW: 'Alpha Dog' has realistic bite
(AP) - They aren't exactly likable characters, the drug dealers and stoners and wannabe gangsters of "Alpha Dog."
(Published 2:58PM, January 9th, 2007)

MOVIE REVIEW: 'Perfume' has a funny smell
(SH) - Blame "The Silence of the Lambs." 1991's Best Picture Oscar winner made it OK for intellectuals who turned up their noses at "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre" and its imitators to endorse a movie that dealt with serial killers and body parts, thanks to the heroine's brilliant but twisted mentor. Nine years later, the same crowd got its own television franchise with "CSI" - weekly doses of viscera elevated by the patina of highly skilled investigations.
(Published 10:18AM, January 5th, 2007)

MOVIE REVIEW: 'Happily N'Ever After' sunk by stale ideas
(AP) - When "Hoodwinked" came out a year ago it felt like a poor man's "Shrek."
(Published 9:57AM, January 5th, 2007)

MOVIE REVIEW: A beauty of a film
(SMW) - Kate Winslet is such a good actress that she convinces us, in "Little Children," that she is not a great beauty.
(Published 9:41AM, January 5th, 2007)

MOVIE REVIEW: 'Freedom Writers' tried, true and irresistible
(SMW) - Legendary football coach Vince Lombardi said his favorite play was one where everyone including the popcorn vendor knew exactly what the team was going to do - but the play worked anyway, because it was executed perfectly.
(Published 9:34AM, January 5th, 2007)

MOVIE REVIEW: 'Children of Men' offers a fully realized nightmare future
(CSM) - "Children of Men" is the rare piece of futurism that actually looks and feels like it was taking place years from now - 2027 to be exact. Loosely adapted from a 1992 P.D. James novel and directed by Alfonso Cuarón, it's a doomsday nightmare that seems all too contemporary.
(Published 8:26AM, January 5th, 2007)

MOVIE REVIEW: 'The Cleaner' is a mess
Jimmy Kimmel once joked that Cedric the Entertainer chose that name for himself because it paid better than going by "Cedric the Janitor."
(Published 11:06AM, January 4th, 2007)

MOVIE REVIEW: First-rate cast lifts 'The Painted Veil'
(SMW) - Novelist and playwright W. Somerset Maugham, that clever observer of upper-class infidelity, had the advantage of writing in the flapper era, when adultery was a life-shattering disgrace that left transgressors forever excommunicated from genteel society.
(Published 12:53PM, December 29th, 2006)

MOVIE REVIEW: 'Rocky Balboa' back in fighting formula
(SMW) - Let's face it, the thought of Sylvester Stallone's aging prizefighter climbing back into the ring is preposterous. As a legitimate contender, the Italian Stallion was over the hill three movies ago.
(Published 1:34PM, December 22nd, 2006)

MOVIE REVIEW: 'We Are Marshall' one-dimensional in its pensiveness
(SMW) - Movies based on true stories can go awry in more ways than one. Some seem too incredible to be true and others too true to be incredible.
(Published 1:27PM, December 22nd, 2006)

MOVIE REVIEW: 'The Good Shepherd' chills and confuses
(CSM) - "The Good Shepherd" is based on a celebrated Eric Roth script that famously made the rounds for years before finally being made by none other than Robert De Niro. It's his first directing job since his debut, "A Bronx Tale," in 1993.
(Published 1:15PM, December 22nd, 2006)

MOVIE REVIEW: Vintage Stiller helps 'Museum' come alive
(SMW) - "Night at the Museum" is a high-concept comedy that skimps on things such as plot and character development but holds nothing back when it comes to high-energy silliness. In other words, it's vintage Ben Stiller in his wacky mode.
(Published 12:55PM, December 22nd, 2006)

MOVIE REVIEW: Eastwood outdoes himself with 'Letters from Iwo Jima'
(CSM) - Clint Eastwood's "Letters From Iwo Jima" is his companion piece to "Flags of Our Fathers" and in almost every way is superior. That earlier movie had its powerful moments, but it was entangled by its complicated time structure, and its message - that patriotic propaganda is problematic even when fighting a "just" war - was tangled, too.
(Published 6:55AM, December 22nd, 2006)