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 ...

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 ...


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