There was a time when Vin Diesel was pegged as an up-and-coming actor in Hollywood. Steven Spielberg famously wrote a new character into Saving…
Many of cinema’s most divisive filmmakers are accused of betraying the story they’re trying to tell by utilizing various stylistic affectations. Of course, this…
Amy Adams is quite an actress. Excluding her forgettable role as the middle-nun in Doubt last year, Adams has turned in consistently compelling and…
Julia Roberts hasn’t been the centerpiece of a film since the moderate success Mona Lisa Smile six years ago. Distracted by kids, a new…
“Virtue may be assailed, but never hurt, surprised by unjust force, but not enthralled,” so says John Milton (Comus I. 589), whose words resonate…
Here comes another remake of a Disney classic. In the 1970s Witch Mountain series, which included a couple of theatrical releases and some made-for-TV…
Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Three Monkeys, Turkey’s measured and quietly devastating 2009 Oscar entry for Best Foreign Language Film, is a work in which every…
Everlasting it may not be, but, at 131 minutes, Jan Troell’s new Swedish melodrama isn’t exactly short. It plods, and it does so while…
The International, the new thriller from director Tom Tykwer, could have been dismissed as an easy knee-jerk reaction to our current economic crisis, but…
Two Lovers is the fourth feature from James Gray, whose efforts haven’t been unreservedly praised since his 1994 debut, Little Odessa, and who has…
Essential to success within the medium of cinema is, of course, a film’s visual character, supplementing and even re-characterizing any narrative core. Jonathan Demme’s…
In Paul McGuigan’s dopey superhero techno-thriller, Push, the Asian mob bad guys’ superpower is screaming really loud. They would best be called “screamers,” but…
Awarded the Palm D’or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, Laurent Cantet’s fluid and free-form drama, The Class, commits itself to the natural, unaffected…
After he finished reading Taken’s screenplay for the first time, Liam Neeson can’t have said to himself, “Wow! What a great script! I want…
When you try to conjure up an image of the holocaust, what comes to mind? Maybe Schindler’s List, The Pianist, The Diary of Anne…
Notorious gushes with admiration for a man who was unjustly taken from the world way before his time. Writers Reggie Rock Bythewood and Cheo…
Thor Freudenthal’s Hotel For Dogs, based very loosely on a 1971 children’s book of the same name, succeeds at doing exactly what it wants…
Rob Marshall was afforded a great opportunity when handed the reigns to the film adaptation of hit Broadway musical Nine. The play offers a…