At this point, it seems fair to say that Jonathan Demme is the finest director of concert documentaries working today. Where most are content…
In Remember Me, Robert Pattinson’s voiceover twice cites a possibly-apocryphal quote by Gandhi: “Whatever you do in life will be insignificant. But it’s very…
“This is not a shortcut to the other side,” reads a sign on the wall of an occupied Baghdad palace during a particularly dull…
The Runaways’ place in rock history is slight at best. They occupy a buried patch between feminal compatriots Patti Smith and the Go-Go’s and…
There’s something to be said for the achievement of a modest goal. Kevin Smith has stated that his reasoning behind directing Cop Out was that…
Frederick Wiseman’s latest doc was designed with the precision of an arabesque and contains a lesson on just how much precision an arabesque actually…
Martin Scorsese has been letting us down for years, helming the sort of film that was roasted in 1992’s The Player, but which still…
Jason Reitman’s Up in the Air feels like a sales pitch, and thanks to the film’s manipulative powers, we actually start to believe that…
You think your life is hard? Sure, we all have problems, but Precious has it worse than most of us. An illiterate Harlem teenager…
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…
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.…
To term something a “festival film” can be patronizing — it pigeonholes a movie as one with very limited audience appeal. These are usually…
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…
In The Sun, Russian filmmaker Alexander Sokurov finds the perfect subject matter for his unique aesthetic, drawing an intimate portrait of controversial and eccentric…
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,…
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…
When I was in third grade, I discovered my love for writing while penning an essay about Amelia Earhart. I vividly remember sitting at…
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,…