This year's best movies were wildly inventive, endlessly entertaining, and confronted modern American culture head-on.

ON AN OCTOBER night in 1989, a 4-year-old girl was shocked awake by a phone ringing and then a scream. She crept out of her bedroom and tiptoed barefoot along the hallway’s clammy vinyl tile, ...

Given Spike Lee's pedigree, coupled with remaking one of Kurosawa's films and Lee and Washington's past collaborations, ...