John Carter

The Best Films That the Oscars Ignored

This evening is the annual Academy Awards telethon for Harvey Weinstein, and the Academy has again decided to nominate every dull, derivative, and overly melodramatic film ...

William Holden and Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard

The Dawn of Sunset Boulevard

Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard, with Gloria Swanson as a silent-screen legend plotting a comeback and William Holden as her toy boy, remains one of the most famous movies ...

David O. Russell

David O. Russell’s Comeback From Crazytown

Few disagree with the line from the old Jimmy Buffett song that “If we couldn’t laugh, we’d all go insane.” Yet in movies, humorless characters are ...

Jessica Chastain

A Wilderness of Mirrors

Kathryn Bigelow, director of the Kill Osama thriller Zero Dark Thirty (which goes into national release Friday), has always been the film nerd's dream date: attractive, classy, ...

The Unbearable Dullness of Judd Apatow

This Is 40 is one of those rare films that is so unforgivingly awful, it’s worth watching. What was apparently intended to be a quirky peek at Judd Apatow’s real-life ...

Jamie Foxx

Tarantino Explained

Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained is, among much else during its leisurely 165-minute running time, an adolescent male revenge fantasy about an omnipotent mass shooter wreaking ...

Lindsay Lohan

Loathing Lindsay Lohan

One of my minor irritants is seeing weak people intentionally set up to fail. It happens more often in Hollywood than anywhere else on Earth. When a production tanks, a troubled ...

Keira Knightley

Anna Karenina: Sympathy for the Cuckold

Joe Wright first directed Keira Knightley in a decent remake of Pride and Prejudice in 2005. Two years later, Wright and Knightley almost hit the Academy Award jackpot with the ...

Daniel Day-Lewis

Lincoln: A Tall Man in a Small Film

With his unimpeachable performance in Steven Spielberg's Lincoln (which opens nationwide on Friday), Daniel Day-Lewis seems ready to become the first man ever to win three Best ...

Mel Gibson

Post-Apocalypto

Among literary critics, a controversy has been raging tepidly over what purpose reviewing might hold in this age of crowdsourcing. Why rely upon one fallible pundit’s thumbs ...

Joseph Gordon-Levitt

The Scoop on Looper

Rian Johnson's critically acclaimed Looper, starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Bruce Willis as young and old versions of the same time-traveling assassin, asks the question: If ...

The Old Abnormal

In 1966, Bruce Lee threw himself (literally) into the role of Kato, the Green Hornet's sidekick, when he costarred in a TV series based on the Silver Age comic book. Alas, the ...

A Masterful Acting Clinic

The Master, starring Philip Seymour Hoffman and Joaquin Phoenix in a period piece very loosely based on the origins of Scientology, is a sumptuous viewing experience. Yet nobody ...

How Robots Push Our Buttons

Robot & Frank is a clever little sci-fi dramedy about a semi-senile old coot whose concerned son buys him a robot as a valet and minder. The film is well crafted and timely ...

Projecting Talent Onto Criminals

Are criminals in real life ever even one-tenth as fascinating as they are in Christopher Nolan movies? Can you think of a real criminal as intriguing as the late Heath Ledger's ...

Lars von Trier

Twilight of the Übermensch

You probably haven"€™t heard of Get the Gringo, a recent Lethal Weapon-like action movie starring Mel Gibson and directed by his right-hand man Adrian Grunberg. Mad Mel plays ...


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