Tim Burton’s fantasy of alienation and acceptance, Edward Scissorhands (1990), is almost as haunting as it is romantic — a cunning mixture of charm and fright that shows us a soul in torment. The gentle title character, played by a young Johnny Depp, is the creation of a Frankenstein-like inventor…

In the mood to launch a thousand ships? Fine, but it’s gonna cost you. Feel like sacking the Temple of Apollo? Okay, but bring drachmas. Depending on who’s counting, the Warner Bros. pre-summer blockbuster Troy budgeted out at anywhere between $175 and $250 million, including the big wooden horse, assorted…

Tony Scott’s True Romance (1993) puts a hip ’90s spin on the lovers-on-the-run formula perfected early on by Fritz Lang’s You Only Live Once and, three decades later, by Bonnie and Clyde. Written by ace smart-aleck Quentin Tarantino (Pulp Fiction), it stars Christian Slater as a movie-crazed geek named Clarence,…

When a pleasant Italian comedy called Mediterraneo won the 1992 Academy Award for best foreign-language film, a lot of observant American movie-goers scratched their heads. Gabriele Salvatores’s fairy tale of Italian soldiers happily stranded on a gorgeous Greek island during World War II was an outright charmer, but it certainly…

The strangest and most obsessive of Alfred Hitchcock’s thrillers, Vertigo has fascinated assorted movie buffs, philosophers and psychiatric professionals since its release in 1958 — not least because this tangled tale about an acrophobic ex-detective on the trail of an old friend’s beautiful wife suggests that reinventing a living woman…

Pour a couple of Old-Fashioneds into the average golf historian, and it won’t be long until he gets misty-eyed over Robert Tyre Jones Jr. Jones not only ruled golf in the 1920s, the fellow will tell you; he also epitomized the gentlemanly ideal of the old Scottish game, transplanted to…

Suicide made merry. Brotherly devotion tinged with carnal deceit. Personal tragedy transformed by malicious humor. These are some of the oil-and-water notions advanced by Lone Scherfig’s Wilbur (Wants to Kill Himself), a mood-switching meditation on love and death that goes out of its way to yank our chains. From the…

One of Hollywood’s most enduring leading men will be the centerpiece of four film screenings and a lecture this weekend at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center. The Cary Grant Film Festival begins on Friday evening, April 23, and will be highlighted by the Nancy Nelson Masterpiece Lecture at 6…

Claude Lanzmann’s agonizing epic Shoah (1985) remains, in critic Roger Ebert’s phrase, “one of the noblest films ever made” and, beyond all doubt, one of the greatest non-fiction works committed to celluloid. It runs almost nine and a half hours but never betrays its great length because (Ebert again) this…

When we first see the title characters of Connie and Carla, a penny-dreadful imitation of one of Hollywood’s most inimitable comedies, they are loud-mouthed junior-high girls mugging in the school cafeteria. A minute later, they are loud-mouthed grownups (well, they’re the size of grownups) screaming out show tunes in a…

Among the film world’s brilliant jokers and devoted anarchists, Luis Buñuel has no equal — never will. And in the great, daunting body of the Spanish director’s work, which spans five decades, That Obscure Object of Desire (1977) must rank somewhere between the sublime and the miraculous. Always at home…

Israeli writer-director Nir Bergman’s Broken Wings never shows an automatic weapon, a military roadblock or a horrific explosion on a city street. Rather than deal with the volatile politics of the Middle East, this quiet, soul-wrenching film examines the unresolved traumas of one middle-class family trying to cope with the…

In the ’60s and ’70s, underground cartoonist R. Crumb captured the anxieties and neuroses of an entire time and spawned a major cult with his “Keep on Truckin'” panels, his X-rated scoundrel Fritz the Cat and the unbridled lunacy he brought to Zap Comix. But it took the inspired documentarian…

Okay, say you feel like leaping from a highway overpass onto the roof of a fast-moving truck, then bouncing onto the top of the van that follows and then crashing headfirst onto the pavement. In Hong Kong, there are plenty of movie directors happy to let you try it. Just…

The re-release of Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers couldn’t come at a more crucial time. Shot in stark black and white and employing a pseudo-documentary style that was widely imitated, this political classic from 1966 is a startlingly intimate portrait of Algerian nationalists who, from 1954 to 1962, sought…

The appeal of a quirky little Norwegian film called Kitchen Stories arises from the unlikeliest of sources: a series of domestic studies conducted back in the early 1950s by a group of Swedish efficiency experts. The mission of the Home Research Institute, as far as anyone could tell, was to…

Just in time for March Madness, and in the wake of the new Olympic hockey flag-waver Miracle, comes a revival of Hoosiers (1986), the ultimate feel-good sports movie. Starring the peerless Gene Hackman as a willful high school basketball coach with a shady past, and Dennis Hopper as the alcoholic…

It’s a 48-minute advertisement for mass obsession that has no time for irony or skepticism, and halfway through, the non-committed may start feeling a bit carsick. But for anyone who savors the scent of burning rubber and understands what a restrictor plate is, NASCAR 3D: The IMAX Experience will be…