Giant Ambition

With a commanding, possessed performance by Daniel Day-Lewis and a subject that lies at the root of our modern nation, Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood is a transfixing journey into the American character.

The Unseen Hand

Amir Bar-Lev got more than he bargained for when he followed child painter Marla Olmstead and her family for a year in the riveting documentary My Kid Could Paint That.

The Little Devil

George Ratliff's Joshua (due out this summer from Fox Searchlight) offers a new take on one of cinema's best guilty pleasures - the evil-kid film. Begun in the '60s with films like The Village of the Damned and The Bad Seed, the genre reached its glory days in the '70s, when its naughty children took on demonic and supernatural qualities in such films as The Omen, The Exorcist and Audrey Rose.

Battle Tested

Zack Snyder brings Frank Miller's ultraviolent graphic novel, 300, to life with amazing special effects and non-stop action.

This Bitter Earth

After 30 years Charles Burnett's Lullaby for America, Killer of Sheep, finally gets its due.

I Am A Bird Now

Marion Cotillard creates a riveting portrait of artistic inspiration and excess in Olivier Dahan's La Vie en Rose.

The Director Interview: Brian Cook

Color Me Kubrick: A True...ish Story is the fascinating story of English conman Alan Conway (flamboyantly portrayed by John Malkovich) who made his career out of impersonating Stanley Kubrick. Conway found out that hardly anyone actually knew what Kubrick looked like, a discovery which led him to take his deception to extravagant, and often ridiculous, extremes.

Aftershocks

Karen Moncrieff's The Dead Girl examines the emotional repercussions of a prostitute's murder on five troubled L.A. women.

Open Your Eyes

Experimental filmmaker Barbara Hammer looks back on her thirty-plus years in film.

Camera Ready

Following up the success of his S&M romance Secretary, Steven Shainberg tackles the story of Diane Arbus, the iconoclastic photographer of freaks, oddballs and the perverse.

Playground Rules

Todd Field follows-up his acclaimed first feature, In the Bedroom, with a mordantly perceptive film about the paranoias of modern life, Little Children.

L.A. Stories

Matthew Ross talks with legendary writer/director Robert Towne about his filmic meditations on Los Angeles, including his latest, Ask the Dust, an adaptation of John Fante's classic novel.

The Show Must Go On

Taking place on the last night of a long-running radio series, Robert Altman's A Prairie Home Companion is a bittersweet ode to performance and the iconic director's best film in years.

The Schizoid Man

Director Richard Linklater creates an animated allegory for our times with A Scanner Darkly, an adaptation of sci-fi great Philip K. Dick's darkly comic tale about drug-using undercover agents.

Aggressive Tendencies

In his riveting and informative new doc, Why We Fight, filmmaker Eugene Jarecki takes a revealing personality profile of America and the military-industrial complex it supports. When a time capsule is opened 100 years from now and our current cinema is rewatched for the messages it conveys about ourselves, we can be sure that Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 will be the film that helps explain the zeitgeist of turn-of-the-century American political discourse.

Show Me Love

Cinematic provocateur Caveh Zahedi continues to turn his life into art with I am a Sex Addict, a wickedly clever new autobiographical comedy. Caveh Zahedi is easily accused of navel-gazing solipsism - the subject matter of his four feature films and several additional shorts is, first and foremost, Caveh Zahedi - but his inventive artistry and rigorous work ethic belie any notion that this method is too finite a canvas for a long career.

Bring That Beat Back

When Dave Chappelle needed someone to film what he planned as the greatest hip-hop concert ever, he called Eternal Sunshine genius Michel Gondry. The result is not only a great concert film but also a fantastic portrait of the actor/comedian as he harnesses the healing power of music.

Presumed Missing

New York-based filmmaker Lodge Kerrigan is a former student of philosophy at Columbia and filmmaking at New York University, an Independent Spirit Award Winner, and the recipient of both Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundation fellowships for his intense voyages into the frailty of the human soul.