Film

The new releases Shutter Islandand The Ghost Writer both take places on islands off the coast of the Eastern seaboard. Critic David Edelstein explains how the two movies, made by Martin Scorsese and Roman Polanski respectively, are a study in contrasts — in directors, plot, and mood.

Luc Besson's latest action fantasy, From Paris With Love, stars John Travolta as an FBI agent and Jonathan Rhys Myers as a diplomat trying to stop a terrorist attack in Paris. The story moves at warp speed — and it doesn't skimp on thrills.

Here's Mel Gibson as a Boston police detective, shambling onto the screen in Edge of Darkness for the first time in nearly a decade — and it's hard for us (and probably harder for him) to shake off that decade's effects.

There's a basic tension in the true-ish docudrama Extraordinary Measures that lifts it above the formula disease-of-the-week picture. Brendan Fraser plays John Crowley, a Bristol-Myers Squibb executive with a daughter and son born with the rare Pompe disease, a cousin to muscular dystrophy that fatally weakens muscles — including the biggie, the heart.

Andrea Arnold had captured something volatile and splendid in Fish Tank

David Edelstein reviews "Youth in Revolt."

James Cameron's trademark blend of grandiosity, jaw-dropping technology and cornball populism is back — and mightier than ever — in Avatar, a vertigo-inducing sci-fi epic that's as predictable and tin-eared as it is savvy and technically adept.

Critic John Powers has a theory: The best movies to give are seldom the recent hits. Instead, a good gift DVD should transport you into a different world that you can immerse yourself in over and over. Check out his favorites for this holiday season.

Critic David Edelstein says the Lord of the Rings director has violated Alice Sebold's celebrated novel with an adaptation marked by tawdry sentimentality and cheap mysticism.

German tenor Max Lorenz had a voice that could move millions — though Lorenz will be most remembered as Hitler's (and Wagner's) favorite. A new documentary about The Life and Times of Max Lorenz, chronicles the conflict and triumph of his unlikely voice and paints an intimate portrait, according to critic Lloyd Schwartz.