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,…
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…
Scary notion: what if YouTube, with its streaming transmissions of home-movie inanity and fleeting flashes of sign o’ the times import, was our first and…
The work of Parisian auteur Claire Denis has been cause célébre for many film critics over the last two decades. Her adoring supporters do backflips…
Japanese masters Yasujiro Ozu and Mikio Naruse (among others) tapped into a cathartic cinema that favors real-time pacing and treats sequences of a tree quivering…
Where do women fit in horror films? In a world dominated by Michael Myers, Leatherface, and Jigsaw, how can women identify with the onscreen action…
A VH1 programmer’s (wet) dream come true, It Might Get Loud assembles three generations of guitar gods under one roof, where they’ll talk shop, swap…
Adaptation is the medium of our time. For better or worse, appropriation has devolved from oxymoronic theories of postmodernism into a more practical mode of…