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,…
Few genres lend themselves as well to a specific holiday as horror does to Halloween. Not every film of the genre directly connects with the holiday (though…
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…
Zombie movies are a dime a dozen and, at this point, most U.S. citizens have either written, starred in, or been an extra in a…
Ricky Gervais has ample amount of personality and charm. He made the British version of The Office into the cult hit it has become, and…
Antichrist is an exorcism of the foulness and unmitigated hatred stewing inside notorious provocateur Lars von Trier. Its production follows a crippling depression which stifled…
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 fraud,…
The single worst thing that ever happened to Michael Moore — as artist, as thinker, as gleefully sardonic agitator — was becoming incredibly rich and…
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 catharsis,…
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 books…