Movie Awards

Featuring attendees like Omar Sharif and Youssef Chahine, Tunisia’s Arab cinema showcase has bestowed top honors on a socially conscious Moroccan drama.

Robin Williams is the Golden Globes’ next recipient of the Cecil B. DeMille Award for lifetime achievement - despite less than 25 years in movies.

An animated Pixar hit, a costly motion-capture fantasy and an ‘end of the world’ disaster flick are among eligible entries for next year’s Academy Awards.

Stephen Daldry’s uneven drama The Hours is immensely helped by the performances of Meryl Streep and Nicole Kidman + Philip Glass’ haunting score.

Potential Oscar contenders include weeping camel, Howard Zinn and slain Civil Rights activist. But polemical Iraq War features have been thoroughly bypassed.

The 1977 Oscar-nominated political thriller Operation Thunderbolt is a dismal failure as both cinema and propaganda. Klaus Kinski star.

Foreign Language Film Oscar get entries from 49 countries, but 2 internationally acclaimed Gael García Bernal movies have ended up as Academy Award orphans.

The last of the Romanovs are at the center of Nicholas and Alexandra, a lavish but appallingly conventional Oscar-nominated historical drama.

Imelda Staunton delivers a superb performance as a mid-1950s abortionist in Mike Leigh’s socially conscious family drama Vera Drake.

The Devil Strikes at Night (1957 Movie): Robert Siodmak’s intriguing political drama asks whether serial killers are any less dangerous than socially sanctioned mass murderers.

Cast Away (2000 Movie): Tom Hanks delivers an excellent performance in Robert Zemeckis’ feel-good adventure flick exalting the Triumph of the Human Spirit nonsense.

The Fixer (1968 Movie): Starring a miscast Alan Bates, John Frankenheimer and Dalton Trumbo’s anti-Semitism drama is ruined by heavy-handed direction and a simplistic script.

Stagy screenplay and 3 of its 4 leads hinder Fred Zinnemann’s early drug addiction drama A Hatful of Rain. Eva Marie Saint is the sole standout.

Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks can’t save Nora Ephron’s unromantic and unfunny (but commercially successful) 1993 romantic comedy Sleepless in Seattle.

Best Actor Oscar nominee Johnny Depp is flawlessly weird in the surprisingly entertaining Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl.

In a difficult role, Oscar nominee Joan Allen delivers a masterful performance in Rod Lurie’s engrossing but unconvincing 2000 political drama The Contender.

Miscast cast (Michael Douglas, Tobey Maguire et al) + heavy directorial hand hinder Curtis Hanson and Steve Kloves’ Wonder Boys movie adaptation.

The Oscar-nominated The Grandfather works both as a Fernando Fernán Gómez showcase and as an irresistible message movie.

Best Actress Oscar nominee Gena Rowlands and John Cassavetes’ A Woman Under the Influence is seriously marred by its own inauthentic ‘rawness.’

Starring Halle Berry and Billy Bob Thornton, Marc Forster’s 2001 drama Monster’s Ball offers quality moments that fail to amount to a satisfying whole.

Gaping narrative issues hinder Sam Mendes’ gangster noir Road to Perdition, otherwise a great showcase for stars Tom Hanks and Paul Newman.

Naomi Watts delivers an exceptional performance - or rather, two of them - in David Lynch’s unsettling Hollywood horror tale Mulholland Dr..

John Cassavetes’ landmark and widely admired 1968 independent drama Faces is a narrative wreck and a long-winded cinematic chore.

War-related movies were the clear favorites at the San Sebastian Film Festival, where Lifetime Achievement honors went to Hollywood celebrities Woody Allen and Annette Bening.