Michael Wilmington

"Iron Island"--a powerful symbolic drama set in an impoverished Arab-Iranian community living aboard an abandoned oil tanker in the Persian Gulf--is another example of the riddle of Iranian cinema. The...

John Ford, for many of us, was the great American movie director--because of his classic filmmaking gifts, but also because his movies are so powerfully and hauntingly about America. They...

Comic book-derived superhero movies are often wildly variable in quality. But the "X-Men" series, a trilogy of movie epics about a group of angst-ridden mutant supermen and superwomen, based on...

For the true movie lover, few experiences match watching a great film in a huge theater, immersed in darkness, with light and humanity pouring down from that magical screen. Still,...

Few films are more unsettling than Roman Polanski's "Repulsion." A spine-chilling 1965 shocker about an emotionally fragile young woman's descent into madness, it shows London's "Swinging '60s" in a different,...

(U.S.; Hank Rogerson, 2005) The power of art to redeem the pain and cruelty of life is demonstrated to enormous effect in "Shakespeare Behind Bars," an amazing documentary by director...

(U.S., Germany, Italy; Ari Taub, 2005) Ari Taub's "The Fallen" is a good, thoughtful low-budget World War II drama set in Italy during 1944, at the time when the Allies...

Deepa Mehta's "Water"--the third film in her elemental "Fire"-"Earth"-Water" trilogy--is a gentle yet powerful drama of social protest, an impassioned portrayal of the fruits of prejudice, set in 1938 India,...

The Tunisian-French-Jewish family writer-director Karin Albou shows us in her first theatrical feature, "La Petite Jerusalem," is torn between tradition and modernity and is also part of a larger community...

'The Wild," the latest feature cartoon from the Walt Disney Studio, starts out with a few strikes against it, including a story suspiciously similar to last year's not-so-hot "Madagascar." But...