The Band’s cover of Bob Dylan’s “When I Paint My Masterpiece” plays during the opening sequence of Jody Hill’s new black comedy, Observe and Report,…
Cary Joji Fukunaga’s Sin Nombre bests its Disneyfied cousin Slumdog Millionaire in nearly every way. Whereas Danny Boyle’s film is frenetically shot, frantically paced, and…
Following 2006’s Half Nelson, a convincing depiction of friendship between a 13-year-old and her crack-addict teacher (a role which Ryan Gosling won an Academy Award…
In 12, director Nikita Mikhalkov brings to fruition a project ten years in the making. The film is something of a re-imagining of Sidney Lumet’s…
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 Private…
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 is…
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 nuanced…
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 husband,…
“Virtue may be assailed, but never hurt, surprised by unjust force, but not enthralled,” so says John Milton (Comus I. 589), whose words resonate in…
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 movies,…
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 moody,…
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 telling…
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 the…
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 been…
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 recent…
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 their…
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 representation…
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 to…
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 Frank,…
Notorious gushes with admiration for a man who was unjustly taken from the world way before his time. Writers Reggie Rock Bythewood and Cheo Hodari…
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 to…