Rosamund Pike

Gone Girl: The Last Villainess?

The denunciations of the hit mystery movie Gone Girl by feminists for daring to feature (spoiler alert) a scheming villainess rather than a brutish villain exemplifies the growing ...

Gabrielle Union

The Most Sensible Guy in the Room

Irving Kristol (sort of) said, "€œA conservative is a liberal who's been mugged,"€ a quip which, besides not being as true as it should be, rather perversely makes me think ...

The Birth of a Nation

Defending Film

This was a bad summer for movies at the American box office, with total gross down 22 percent from last year. Revenue was the lowest since 2006, suggesting that the recent ...

James Brown

Get On Up: Godfather of Subtitles

August has been turning into Black Movie Month. This year, Tate Taylor, the white guy from Mississippi who directed August 2011's The Help, is back with a stylized James Brown ...

Every Ape for Himself

The usual complaint of critics about sequels is that they are intellectually unchallenging. Yet sequels have become more cognitively demanding as screenwriters have come to assume ...

Russell Crowe

No Room on the Ark

Darren Aronofsky's Noah accomplishes what any great myth should: it communicates moral truths through a fantasy. Mankind has destroyed the Creator's creation, and so Man must be ...

Roger Moore and Sean Connery

The Two 007s

In the movie business, conventional wisdom has it that to succeed at the box office a film must include profanity, obscenity, blood, gore, blasphemy, and, of course, lots of sex. ...

Her: A Two-Hour Put-On?

When writer-director Spike Jonze won a Best Screenplay Golden Globe this week for Her, his little science-fiction fable about Joaquin Phoenix falling in love with his Siri-like ...

The New Hunger Games: Empty Calories

When a movie enjoys a $153-million opening weekend, you might think the writer-director would be the toast of the town. Yet even while Gary Ross’s 2012 hit The Hunger Games, ...

Bruce Dern

77 Years a Dern

Will Nebraska, Alexander Payne’s modest masterpiece starring 77-year-old Bruce Dern as a taciturn ex-mechanic who stares like a senile prairie dog, somehow edge out ...

Chiwetel Ejiofor

New Movie, Same Old Skin Game

12 Years a Slave"€”a biopic about Solomon Northup, a black fiddler in New York who somehow wound up a slave in Louisiana from 1841 until the law rescued him in 1853"€”is the ...

Asa Butterfield in Ender's Game

The Boycott on Normalcy

I caught Ender’s Game last night and was quite surprised: The film subtly advocates for values of liberal governance. The plot centers around a gender-integrated, ...

James Toback and Alec Baldwin in Cannes

Last Tango in Baghdad

James Toback is a very intelligent screenwriter and director who discovered Harvey Keitel and also turned Mike Tyson into an actor of sorts, mostly playing Tyson. Toback relishes ...

Oprah Winfrey and Forest Whitaker

Butler Unchained

The hit movie Lee Daniels’ The Butler, staring Forest Whitaker and Oprah Winfrey, takes us back to the bad old days when blacks worked in the White House rather than lived ...

Matt Damon

Elysium: Neill Blomkamp Fools the Critics Again

The new movie Elysium, another science-fiction fable from young Boer refugee Neill Blomkamp about the horrors of mass immigration and nonwhite overpopulation, isn’t terribly ...

Krysten Ritter

The Importance of Being Earnestly Bitchy

The golden age of television sitcoms petered out in the late 1990s when NBC couldn"€™t convince Jerry Seinfeld to come back for one more season despite offering him a salary of ...


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