All articles by Joe Lozito

Michael Mann’s reverent, meandering, overlong biopic of the man who would be champ may not be The Greatest, but some of its performances are, particularly from Will Smith.

Ambitious, disjointed, messy spectacle from co-writer/director/conspiracy theorist Oliver Stone is so full of plot lines it seems bent on telling the 32-year life of the world’s greatest conqueror in real time.

Steven Spielberg takes Stanley Kurbrick’s story of a robotic Pinocchio lost in a dark future and lightens it up with a bit too much schmaltz, but Haley Joel Osment’s extraordinary performance carries the film.

Writer and evil genius Charlie Kaufman teams up again with director Spike Jonze for this brilliant, self-referential ode to writer’s block and worthy successor to ‘Being John Malkovich’.

Who would have thought that Jack Nicholson could surprise us again? As Alexander Payne’s title character, Nicholson drops everything that makes him ‘Jack’ and gives the most raw, honest portrayal of his career.

Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore cute their way through another romantic comedy, this one with only a slightly less inspired premise than their previous effort, ‘The Wedding Singer’. If Sandler didn’t insist on surrounding himself with a freak show of grotesque sidekicks there might have been a good movie in here.

Danny Boyle’s so-called reinvention of the ‘zombie horror’ genre is neither a reinvention nor about zombies. Instead it is a fascinating study of the nature of human survival in the face of a deadly and grotesque plague which turns its victims into blood-spewing cannibals in under 30 seconds. That is, until it degenerates into an incongruous morality tale with an action movie climax that abandons all that came before it.

For once, a Spike Lee movie that doesn’t scream out that it’s a Spike Lee movie, except in one extraordinary, visceral rant in a bathroom mirror. Oddly, the directionless story of a man’s last day of freedom before a 7-year-prison term might have been more interesting if it were Spike’d.

Insultingly manipulative, oddly misogynistic thriller which attempts to push the audience’s buttons with all the subtlety of a brick in the face.

Director Curtis Hanson and rapper Eminem team up to film an oddly uninvolving story based loosely on the hip-hop superstar’s life. The scenes revolving around the music are the most interesting, but the surrounding drama doesn’t match up.