Peter Weir’s sweeping nautical adventure Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003), based on the beloved novels of Patrick O’Brien, all but blows sea spray from the screen. Russell Crowe is Captain Jack Aubrey of the H.M.S. Surprise, an English officer on the high seas during the Napoleonic wars, and Paul Bettany […]
Mystic River (2003) – Three adolescent boys write their names in the wet cement of a newly poured sidewalk patch in their Boston neighborhood, but the last boy is interrupted, his name unfinished when he’s taken away in a car by two men who purport to be cops but are child molesters who torture him […]
The Matrix (1999) has become such a touchstone of American pop culture—referenced, copied, parodied, and parroted—that it’s hard to remember just how new and different and distinctive it was when it debuted in 1999. Which is not to say that it is completely original. Image Tron as a Greek Myth, or Sim City as an […]
Ji-woon Kim has proven himself one of the most interesting and versatile filmmakers to come out of South Korea in the past two decades with such films as The Quiet Family (1998), The Good the Bad the Weird (2008), and I Saw the Devil (2010). With the haunting A Tale of Two Sisters (South Korea, […]
The Wachowski Siblings conceived and produced The Animatrix (2003), an anthology of nine original animated short films, as a companion piece to their Matrix trilogy and a tribute to Japanese anime, one of their visual inspirations. The best pieces are short stories in the Matrix-verse concocted by the Japanese animation veterans: Beyond, a fanciful Miyazaki-in-Matrixland story […]
The Station Agent (2003) is in many ways the launching pad for two impressive careers. It is the directorial debut of actor Tom McCarthy, whose 2015 film Spotlight won the Academy Award for Best Feature, and it is the first starring role for actor Peter Dinklage, who since went on to become the Emmy-winning star […]
28 Days Later (2003), Danny Boyle’s 21st century take on the zombie film, isn’t actually a zombie film, Boyle insists, and technically he’s correct. The springy, savage human monsters aren’t dead, merely infected with an experimental viral weapon called “rage,” which has turned them into mindless animals intent in tearing every living thing they see […]
Buried under kerchief, blousy shirt, and the make-up of a heavy metal fashion victim, Johnny Depp bobs and weaves his way through the hit pirate trilogy as Jack Sparrow, a black pirate come high seas con man with a heart of tarnished stolen gold. He seems to have stumbled in from his own private movie […]
Arnold Schwarzenegger’s old, obsolete Terminator is back in black in Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003). Black leather, that is, as well as his trademark dark glasses and mono-syllabic punchlines. He may be machine, but he’s got the spirit of a human whirring inside the gearbox as he plays tough-love father figure to John […]
Jackie Chan and Owen Wilson bring the Far East and the old West to 19th century London as they search for Chan’s sister (Fann Wong) in Shanghai Knights (2003), a high spirited but dumbed-down sequel to Shanghai Noon. A constant barrage of pop-culture references (from 1960s British Invasion rock tunes to appearances by 19th century […]
