Winter’s Bone: Blood in the Ozarks

Winter's Bone, an arthouse detective drama now out on DVD, is the Scots-Irish hillbilly equivalent of all those fine recent movies about the Irish Catholic Massachusetts ...

Ed Harris and Colin Farrell in <i>The Way Back</i>

The Way Back: Hollywood Discovers the Gulags

To be Oscar-eligible, a movie had to have played for one week last year in Southern California. Last Christmas, I had looked forward to heading down to the ArcLight on Sunset ...

Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling

Blue Valentine and the Decline of Men

Blue Valentine, a superbly acted indie drama about a middle-class nurse falling out of love with her working-class house-painter husband, is both a timeless look at how sexual ...

A Miserable Slog Called Biutiful

Who's the leading leading man these days? Having sat through all 147 dolorous minutes of Biutiful, Alejandro González Iñárritu's follow-up to 2006's Babel (a pretentious ...

Charles Portis and John Wayne

The New “€œTrue Grit”€: Truer to the Portis Novel

The Coen Brothers"€™ devotion to odd vernaculars has contributed to their haphazard box-office track record. Audiences immediately cottoned to Fargo's "€œYou betcha"€ ...

Casino Jack: Homo Conman Politicus

Casino Jack is a consistently amusing biopic starring Kevin Spacey as the manic, bull-necked Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who recently spent three and a half years in prison ...

Fame! I”€™m Gonna Be Harassed Forever

"€œI always want to say to people who want to be rich and famous: ‘Try being rich first,’"€ Bill Murray once said. "€œThere’s not much downside to being ...

The Fighting Irish

On Friday, I was shocked like the rest of America to learn that Richard Nixon had been taped in the Oval Office subscribing to a stereotype: "€œThe Irish can"€™t ...

Black Swan: Hysterical, But Not Necessarily Funny

What's the most demanding sport? A 1975 Journal of Sports Medicine study by James Nicholas, an NFL, NBA, and NHL team doctor, ranked 61 sports on 18 different measures of physical ...

The King’s S-S-Speech

In outline, The King's Speech sounds like a Wayans Brothers spoof of a Weinstein Brothers prestige film: an Oscar-bound movie where the King of England, a victim of society's ...

Harry Potter

J. K. Rowling: Britain’s Most Important Cultural Conservative

Kids these days have short attention spans. Or so I"€™ve often been informed. For example, Baroness Greenfield, an Oxford professor of "€œsynaptic pharmacology,"€ recently ...

127 Hours of Hollywood Hokum

The exuberant 127 Hours, Director Danny Boyle's first movie since winning the Best Picture Oscar for Slumdog Millionaire, is surprisingly comparable to The Social Network. While ...

Inside Job Documentary Passes

Typical documentaries, such as Waiting for "€œSuperman"€ and Freakonomics, are made by people who know more about lenses and lighting than about their subjects. In contrast, ...

Freakonomics

The new documentary Freakonomics harkens back to the good old days of 2005. Remember when economists, having permanently perfected the economy, graciously allowed their attention ...

Ben Affleck’s The Town is a Perfectly Executed Heist

The Town, set amidst the fading (but increasingly fashionable) Irish-American underclass of Boston's gentrifying Charlestown neighborhood, is a model of crime genre filmmaking, ...

The Great Machete Meta-Joke Fail

After the Euro-ennui of The American last week, Robert Rodriguez's Machete sounded pretty entertaining: heroic illegal immigrants driving bouncing lowrider cars slaughter the evil ...


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