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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
The Coen Brothers" devotion to odd vernaculars has contributed to their haphazard box-office track record. Audiences immediately cottoned to Fargo's "You betcha" ...
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 ...
"I always want to say to people who want to be rich and famous: ‘Try being rich first,’" Bill Murray once said. "There’s not much downside to being ...
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: "The Irish can"t ...
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 ...
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 ...
Kids these days have short attention spans. Or so I"ve often been informed. For example, Baroness Greenfield, an Oxford professor of "synaptic pharmacology," recently ...
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 ...
Typical documentaries, such as Waiting for "Superman" and Freakonomics, are made by people who know more about lenses and lighting than about their subjects. In contrast, ...
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 ...
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, ...
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 ...