Skip to content, or skip to search.

Skip to content, or skip to search.

ARCHIVES

Peter Rainer

January 12, 2004 | Movie Review
Prescient Tense

Re-creating the carnage of fifties Algeria—bombings, assassinations, police torture—The Battle of Algiers is as relevant today as it was in 1965.

October 25, 2004 | Movie Review
The Grape Escape

Running from commitments and failures, two college buddies romp through California, sampling the local wine—and women—in Sideways.

October 18, 2004 | Movie Review
Tea and Sympathy

And abortions. That’s what Vera Drake offers working-class girls in distress, in Mike Leigh’s realist portrait of postwar London.

October 11, 2004 | Movie Review
Charming Billy

As London’s greatest Desdemona, Billy Crudup gets in touch with his masculine side (and finds true love) in the gender-bending Stage Beauty.

October 4, 2004 | Movie Review
Love-Less

David O. Russell’s star-studded comedy about “existential detectives” is strictly for the McSweeney’s set. Plus: In Going Upriver, a polite Kerry.

September 27, 2004 | Movie Review
Che Sera Sera

Gael García Bernal’s South American road trip turns him into the revolutionary of everyone’s dreams. Plus: A Dirty Shame is a misnomer.

September 20, 2004 | Movie Review
The Candidate

Dubya gets a noir makeover in John Sayles’s Silver City, but the movie can’t compete with the reality-show drama of the campaign itself.

September 6, 2004 | Movie Review
Smoke and Mirrors

Ross McElwee reflects on his family’s tobacco-growing past—and its fleeting future—in the raw and lovely documentary Bright Leaves.

August 23, 2004 | Movie Review
Vile Bodies, Ourselves

Evelyn Waugh’s classic satire of soirées and scandals is luridly familiar (if a bit overwrought) in Stephen Fry’s adaptation, Bright Young Things.

August 16, 2004 | Movie Review
Cheat Drink Man Woman

Two couples struggle through a bitter cycle of anger, adultery, revenge, and friendship in We Don’t Live Here Anymore.