Remember Omar Sharif? He’s been all but absent from the silver screen in recent years (though he has been seen–or at least heard–on television). According to the actor, he left the trade by choice: “Let us stop this nonsense, these meal tickets that we do because it pays well, unless…

This is not a good movie. Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights is, in fact, a bad movie. The script bleeds one cliché after another; the female lead can’t fire up the heat necessary for her role; and the plot resolves nearly every conflict it introduces within minutes. Worse, even as the…

At the opening of The Fog of War, the brilliant new documentary from director Errol Morris, we see a composed, sharply groomed and middle-aged Robert McNamara preparing to brief the press on the Vietnam War. He asks two questions: First, if the chart he’s set up is visible, and second,…

The setting: an institutional high school in the affluent suburbs. The protagonists: two boys–intelligent, charming and smoldering–with typical suburban lives, including intact families and plenty of spending money. The plot: carnage. Assembling pipe bombs from ingredients purchased at Home Depot and commandeering shotguns slipped from the family cabinet, the boys…

In 1998, a passionate majority of Venezuelans elected a new president. His name was Hugo Chavez, and he was the first leader in generations to come from outside the ruling class. He vowed to redistribute Venezuela’s oil wealth and to involve the people intimately in the political process. Openly comparing…

Feel like an evening at the ballet? Robert Altman’s The Company, a lovely and superficial montage of performance, is less a movie than a series of impressions, a rich sampler of a season with one of America’s premier dance companies–the Joffrey Ballet of Chicago. There’s scandalously little by way of…