Plenty, this writer included, are pretty hard on Nicolas Cage. He’s one of those actors whose films I eventually had to avoid because of my…
Clint Eastwood’s old-school approach to filmmaking has never been more inexpressive than in Invictus, a shallow adaptation of John Carlin’s book, Playing the Enemy. The…
To term something a “festival film” can be patronizing — it pigeonholes a movie as one with very limited audience appeal. These are usually from…
Calling Fantastic Mr. Fox Wes Anderson’s best movie since The Royal Tenenbaums sounds almost like a backhanded compliment. In the very least, it’s pretty faint…
In The Road, John Hillcoat’s long-awaited, big-screen take on a most unlikely bestseller, the world ends with neither a bang nor a whimper. It ends…
In The Sun, Russian filmmaker Alexander Sokurov finds the perfect subject matter for his unique aesthetic, drawing an intimate portrait of controversial and eccentric Japanese…
Set in the gray, drab atmosphere of post-war England, An Education opens with a montage of academia: English schoolgirls being taught to graduate, work, marry,…
The Twilight Saga: New Moon hardly needs an introduction. As the second film in the massively popular vampmance series, courtesy of author Stephanie Meyer, New…
Right from the start, it’s clear no expense was spared and no detail neglected in Tony Jaa’s magnum opus actioner, Ong Bak 2: The Beginning.…
Richard Kelly’s new film is based on Richard Matheson’s short fiction “Button, Button,” in which a man gives a struggling couple a wooden box with…
The weakest of Pedro Almodóvar’s four films this decade, the oddly muted melodrama Broken Embraces is also something no other work from the Spanish master has…
Jonathan Rosenbaum once wrote that the lasting legacy of Star Wars, that quintessential Hollywood popcorn movie, was that it conditioned audiences to process mass death…
When I was in third grade, I discovered my love for writing while penning an essay about Amelia Earhart. I vividly remember sitting at my…
Oren Moverman’s quietly moving wartime drama The Messenger arrives just months after the release of Kathryn Bigelow’s much-hyped action-drama The Hurt Locker, two thematically similar, yet…
Directorial collaborations are notoriously uneven and almost always judged by the parts while ignoring the sum. A successful portmanteau relies on either a galvanizing theme…
In its early ’90s milieu, its parade of ghastly coifs and mustaches, and its earnest attempts to mine modern investigative journalism for gleeful belly laughs,…
Paranormal Activity reputedly had its genesis in director Oren Peli’s lifelong fear of ghosts, which led him to do intensive research into haunting, demonic possession,…
A postmodern mash-up of horror movie fun, The House of the Devil is a fascinating, sometimes frustrating homage to ’70s horror films, set firmly in…
Director Spike Jonze has been quoted in interviews saying that he never set out to make a children’s film, but rather “a film about childhood.”…
In comparison to just about every other film Joel and Ethan Coen have directed in the last fifteen years or so, A Serious Man seems…
Not unlike this year’s other half-baked sci-fi social commentary, District 9, Surrogates begins with a montage of thoroughly phony newsreel footage that forecasts the film’s…