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,…
In its early ’90s milieu, its parade of ghastly coifs and mustaches, and its earnest attempts to mine modern investigative journalism for gleeful belly…
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…
In comparison to just about every other film Joel and Ethan Coen have directed in the last fifteen years or so, A Serious Man…
Ricky Gervais has ample amount of personality and charm. He made the British version of The Office into the cult hit it has become,…
Steven Soderbergh made an interesting choice in telling the story of Mark Whitacre, the agri-food exec who turned informant and paid a price. Part…
The single worst thing that ever happened to Michael Moore — as artist, as thinker, as gleefully sardonic agitator — was becoming incredibly rich…
All tearjerkers are not created equal. This is a point too rarely acknowledged. When it comes to pocket-sized tragedies, those tidy doses of Hollywood-friendly…
Based on the writings of the late David Foster Wallace, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men is a movie for people who like to listen to…