It’s difficult to argue that Darren Aronofsky’s films are poorly executed, at least on a formal level; his largely allegorical works are often manic, intense,…
2012’s Jack Reacher was, at its best, an amusingly bare-bones action movie with a level of simplicity that may have felt a bit like a gritty…
When Michelle (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) wakes up chained to the wall in an underground doomsday bunker after a car accident, she finds herself the captive of…
Despite admonitions in the press materials and interviews with the principals, Michael Bay’s (maybe appropriately) dreaded Benghazi movie can’t possibly read as completely apolitical. Non-partisan,…
News to absolutely nobody: in 2008 a mounting, toxic combination of sheer cluelessness and outright lawbreaking caused the US housing market to collapse, leading to…
Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation, the fifth installment in this franchise, finds hero superspy Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise, but you knew that) battling a sinister organization of…
Terminator Genisys (don’t ask about the spelling) is, by most counts, the third attempt to kickstart a new trilogy of movies in this franchise. Let’s hope…
If you haven’t seen Karel Reisz’s 1974 The Gambler before seeing Rupert Wyatt’s new Mark Wahlberg-starring remake, don’t watch it in close proximity to the…
The self-consciously “epic” epic Interstellar is wildly ambitious, massive in scope, gorgeous to look at, often clumsily sentimental, very serious, and frequently overly expository. In…
Jason Reitman’s latest Oscar shill, the formally inert and thematically overconfident Men, Women & Children, aspires to illustrate how humans — horny high school students and their…
It’s probably (no, definitely) pushing it to suggest that Transformers: Dark of the Moon has anything in common with Terrence Malick’s also-currently-in-theaters The Tree of Life,…
Early critical response to Joel and Ethan Coen’s True Grit, a faithful adaptation of Charles Portis’s western novel, has been mostly positive, yet many mask…
Boxing is a sport dependent on mental strategy, despite what its surface-level brutality suggests. In The Fighter, the physically tough but emotionally stricken welterweight boxer…
In a summer season besieged by stinkers, M. Night Shyamalan’s The Last Airbender took very little time to gather a reputation as the most malodorous…
How to Train Your Dragon is warm and winning—a real charmer of a family film. Given that it’s a product of Dreamworks Studios, who are more…
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…
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…
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,…
G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra is not a great movie. It’s not even a good movie. But we need a different set of aesthetic…
Let’s get one thing straight: Michael Bay’s Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen isn’t a film. It isn’t even entertainment. It’s a two-and-a-half-hour commercial for General…
Until now, the critically acclaimed filmmaker Joe Wright has had an impressive career. In 2005, Wright moved from made-for-television productions like Charles II: The Power…