Sometimes, if you're lucky - late at night, at a drab film festival, when the PR people have escaped to their hotels to do coke - you can sit in on some real talk. I'm thinking of a gathering of men (it is usually...

Steven Soderbergh, who could be the first person in 70 years to collect two best director Academy Award nominations in one year - for "Erin Brockovich" and "Traffic" - has suddenly exploded from indie film semi-obscurity to 800-pound Hollywood gorilla. So it's doubly...

Today is Friday, Jan. 19, the 19th day of 2007. There are 346 days left in the year.Today's Highlight in History:Two hundred years ago, on Jan. 19, 1807, Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee was born in Westmoreland County, Va.On this date:In 1736, James Watt, inventor...

Lacking in Lodi: A Lodi, California, man is suing the city for $3600 for driving a dump truck into his car. The only thing is, he was the city employee driving the truck. The city denied the suit because he was, in essence, suing himself. Not...

Against the background of a return to flag-waving patriotism, demonically derisive movies like Richard Lester's Cuba … seem suddenly anachronistic in the very casualness of their anti-American assumptions…. Americans are not merely ugly, but grotesquely hideous. Certainly, [Lester did not] set out to make any overt political statements, to win over any hearts and minds, as it were. Cuba, though shot in Spain, treats Castro's triumphant entrance into Havana in 1959 as if it were t...

There is a sequence of a girl dancing in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum but the director, Richard Lester, breaks it up so much with camera and editing that we can't see the dance, only flashes of parts of her body, and we can't even tell if the girl can dance because the movement is almost totally supplied by his means. This technique is a good one for concealing the ineptitude of performers, but Lester's short-term camera magic keeps cutting into and away from the comed...

Intelligent reinterpretation is one thing; sensationalistic or smartass revisionism, quite another. [In Robin and Marian] we take Robin Hood, his merry men, and Maid Marian, but show them as middle-aged folk in an autumnal mood, at the end of their chivalric tether. We connect the story even more tightly than usual with Richard the Lionhearted by having Robin and Little John fight under him in the Third Crusade, and making the film begin at Châluz, where Richard meets his end…. That is revisio...