David Edelstein

Bug, the new psychological thriller from director William Friedkin (The Exorcist, The French Connection), got its start as a paranoia-driven stage play by actor-writer Tracy Letts (Killer Joe).

The film won the international critics' prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 2006, but it's only now getting a U.S. release. It features Ashley Judd, Harry Connick Jr. and Lynn Collins, as well as Michael Shannon, who starred in the Off-Broadway production.

Misunderstood giants? None have ever been as popular as Shrek, star of two huge summer hits since 2001. Paramount's grumpy-green-ogre franchise is the epitome of the hand-hold movie: family flicks that serve up action, tomfoolery and life-lessons for the kids, nonstop pop-culture in-jokes for the adults, and fart jokes for the whole family.

Think of Sam Raimi's Spider-Man 3 as a kind of Ben-Hur for our time — it delivers state-of-the-art spectacle, but it also yearns to throw a spotlight on the struggle between good and evil. It ends in deathbed conversions and churchy epiphanies, and it offers more homilies than the average Sunday sermon.

David Edelstein reviews Alain Resnais's film "Coeurs" or "Private Fears in Public Places."

David Edelstein reviews "Hot Fuzz."

The 68-year-old director Paul Verhoeven hasn't made a film in his native Holland since his 1983 thriller The Fourth Man.

That picture led to a long and lucrative career making Hollywood action, suspense, and sci-fi movies, including Starship Troopers, Showgirls and Basic Instinct.

Zombies, car chases, and fake trailers for a string of films that don't exist: Grindhouse is a kind of meta-exploitation double feature from directors Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino.

In the new film Blades of Glory, comic actor Will Ferrell plays a boorish figure skater forced to team up with another man in a pairs skating competition. The role is Ferrell's latest in a series of characters that have parodied macho men.

Mike Binder has directed nine feature films, although before his last, The Upside of Anger, he was best known as an actor and for the television series The Mind of the Married Man.

In Reign Over Me, he gives a serious — an extremely serious — part to the comic Adam Sandler, who plays a man whose life is destroyed by the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

In the year 2000, a civilian employee of the U.S. military in Seoul, South Korea, ordered a Korean subordinate to dump a large amount of formaldehyde into a sewer pipe leading to the Han River. The incident aroused violent anti-American sentiment in Korea, and led to the birth of a monster — a monster movie, called The Host.