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 requires.…
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 gets…
After a yearlong delay, a replacement director, heavy reshoots, and multiple editors, The Wolfman is probably about as good as it could possibly be. It…
More vampires? Really? Is that what we need? You can’t swing a bat at the multiplex these days without hitting one, though it could be…
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 a…
“You’ve never experienced anything like it,” gushed the LA Times about Avatar, James Cameron’s motion-capture extravaganza. And if you aren’t a Cameron connoisseur or an…
You think your life is hard? Sure, we all have problems, but Precious has it worse than most of us. An illiterate Harlem teenager with…
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 my…
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. The…
To term something a “festival film” can be patronizing — it pigeonholes a movie as one with very limited audience appeal. These are usually from…
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 faint…
In The Road, John Hillcoat’s long-awaited, big-screen take on a most unlikely bestseller, the world ends with neither a bang nor a whimper. It ends…