The list is endless with film titles detailing the taxing burden of marriage, the soul-sucking slog that follows the ‘Happily Ever After’ so many other stories like to finish on. Two for the Road and Blue Valentine, twoRead Full Review

The overall majesty of Wes Anderson is tough to pinpoint. There’s a downright stubbornness to the dedication he brings to his precious, dioramic stories, and with each film, there is a creeping feeling that theRead Full Review

The empire of Studio Ghibli is about to lose its foremost patriarch, the legendary filmmaker Hayao Mayazaki – or so he says. His latest film, The Wind Rises, is meant to be his final work beforeRead Full Review

George Clooney’s directorial efforts come pre-packaged with ideas and statements, with thought-provoking ideals meant to help the human race improve. Perhaps the one exception is his first film, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, but that wasRead Full Review

A performance like Paulina Garcia’s in Gloria is difficult to appreciate properly. On the surface, it seems dictated by its physicality and carnality, which is why more sexually explicit storytelling doesn’t translate as successfully in American cinema.Read Full Review

The two directors behind this year’s first legitimate box office blockbuster (no shade on Ride Along, I just think that movie was a much bigger surprise then people expected it to be) have proven adapt atRead Full Review

The Great Beauty has Federico Fellini’s fingerprints all over it. The specter of Marcello Mastroianni, Fellini’s most famous acting collaborator, haunts all of its images. And yet, Paolo Sorrentino’s latest film feels so incredibly fresh andRead Full Review

It’s difficult to make a military film that’s as unapologetically patriotic as Lone Survivor is because it just doesn’t seem that cool. It’s not cool to be so proudly American because that’ll align you with the TeaRead Full Review

Walter Mitty sincerely wants to be taken seriously, but goes about doing so in some rather interesting ways. It’s directed by it’s star, Ben Stiller, with a lot of showy shots, usually equipped with a highRead Full Review

Many important filmmakers are copied, homaged, even straight ripped off. These influences usually guide filmmakers to find their own voices as they weed through the fields of their heroes, and in a lot of casesRead Full Review

Meryl Streep is a goddess amongst us mere humans; it’s essentially been a known fact that she is our greatest living actress since the beginning of this century, possibly beforehand. I’ve been known to getRead Full Review

When I learned of the overall premise of Saving Mr. Banks, I immediately began suffering PTSD of my horrid viewing of the 2004 film, Finding Neverland. In that film, we learn that author J.M. Barry (played withRead Full Review

I remember watching the Oscar broadcast in 2004, where great films like Mystic River and Lost in Translation were forced to bow down to Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King, which won a record-tying elevenRead Full Review

For all of the fantastical visual elements within the features, short films and music videos of Spike Jonze, his storytelling persona has always been dedicated to a very tender, particularly humane tale of life. They’reRead Full Review

David O. Russell’s latest film opens with some text that reads: “Some of This Actually Happened”. It’s a funny little blurb to throw up on the screen which seems like a much more honest representationRead Full Review

For as brilliant and celebrated as the Coen Brothers are, I’m not sure you can go through their filmography and find a performance like Oscar Isaac has in their latest film, Inside Llewyn Davis. They assistedRead Full Review

The last decade and a half of film animation has been so thoroughly dominated by Pixar studios that at times it has seemed like no one else has even put up a fight, least ofRead Full Review

Stephen Frears is one of the most consistent filmmakers working today, which makes it all the more unsettling that he’s spent his last few movies orchestrating English prestige Oscar bait. When you think that heRead Full Review

Bruce Dern is a seventy-three year old actor who’s spent most of those years working consistently as a Hollywood character actor. He was at the peak of his powers in the 1970’s, with bombastic performancesRead Full Review

The Book Thief really means well, and the overall nice-ness of the storytelling here makes it hard to really dislike. In it’s purest form, this is really a story built for children, based on Markus Zusak’sRead Full Review

It’s hard not to feel like Matthew McConaughey’s recent career resurgence is reaching its crescendo here with Dallas Buyers Club. It’s a striking performance, so captivating and virile. He famously lost 35 pounds, and its aRead Full Review

If certain straight people think that homosexuality is too mainstream, they should go and watch Blue is the Warmest Color. It’s bullish, in-your-face and doesn’t hide it’s romantic entanglements behind narrative structure. It won the prestigiousRead Full Review

The plot of The Counselor is complicated in a way that leaves you with very little enthusiasm to actually figure it out. There’s nothing engrossing about this film and these characters. It’s story is not just bleak,Read Full Review

The theme of survival has been explicit throughout the heavy-hitting October releases. Gravity put a frail biomedical scientist against grave odds to survive being lost in space. Captain Phillips showed one man’s attempt to maneuver his way out ofRead Full Review

In a post Django Unchained movie climate, a film like 12 Years a Slave might get swallowed. Both films put almost Mel Gibson-like focus on the brutality of American slavery, soaking the audience in the horrors and the bloodRead Full Review

When you consider that we live in a movie culture where Hollywood has so desperately run out of ideas that they’re making movies out of 500-word children’s books, you have to appreciate the effort putRead Full Review

It’s hard to think of a movie star like Tom Hanks – someone who has been a movie star for such a sustained, lucrative period of time – and think that he will be ableRead Full Review

Thanks to the internet, the development of wifi technology and the boom of video ripping/bootleg movies, pornography is more available to the public than it ever has been before. There is a lot consumption goingRead Full Review

Gravity opens with text meant to reinforce how terrifying outer space is. It seemed like the kind of thing added self-consciously at the last minute because the last thing this movie needs is a list ofRead Full Review

Nicole Holofcener goes out of her way to make movies about women, but she has no interest at looking at them through the Nancy Meyers, feminist-lite lens. She just has stories in her head, mostRead Full Review

Blue Caprice is a movie that documents real, true mental instability. Much like the movies Zodiac and In Cold Blood, it covers a true story of a killer who’s motive is not money or jealousy the way we likeRead Full Review

The world of Formula 1 racing is one of constant danger with every race presenting a twenty-percent chance of a racer dying – as we’re told by one of the characters early in this film.Read Full Review

The themes of Prisoners have been done countless times before, but that doesn’t mean that an interesting film cannot be made from them. It seems in American cinemas there is nothing more terrifying then the abduction ofRead Full Review

Feels like Lake Bell has been around for a very long time. She’s been given a million chances to catch fire with movie audiences. It just hasn’t happened. It’s a lot similar to what keepsRead Full Review

Most of what makes J.D. Salinger one of the most celebrated writers of the Twentieth Century is his uncanny ability to translate the mental trauma of his own life and reflect it into his charactersRead Full Review

When someone as good as Wong Kar Wai doesn’t make a movie for six years, his latest movie is going to be an event, which The Grandmaster is. Six years is a good enough amount of timeRead Full Review

Alas, the days of Mumblecore seem numbered. So long ago seem the days of The Puffy Chair and Funny Ha Ha, when wannabe actors like Mark Duplass and Andrew Bujalski were taking matters into their own hands, writingRead Full Review

There’s something so simple about how beautiful Short Term 12 is. It doesn’t beg for your approval or squeeze pity out of you with its frank subject matter. It expresses itself effortlessly with a drum-tight screenplay andRead Full Review

The evolution of the American Western in cinema is a fascinating one. Once the jewel of all Hollywood genres, it was marked by plots outlining black & white moralities. In the 1960’s, the movies becameRead Full Review

Lee Daniels is a filmmaker of high ideals and low taste, and he enjoys making the two things clash violently in his films. What usually follows are sloppy stories, interesting casting decisions, and more timesRead Full Review

There is a sincerity within Elysium that’s hard to fault. It really wants to be about something – socioeconomic classes, South African apartheid, brutal federal government – but has a bit of a lazy way of beingRead Full Review

There was once a time, before Pineapple Express and The Sitter and Your Highness, that David Gordon Green was one of the most interesting independent filmmakers in America. From George Washington to All The Real Girls, he was the master of the contemporary,Read Full Review

Before my screening for The Spectacular Now, one of the film’s screenwriters, Michael H. Weber, gave a brief introduction in which he spoke of the film as something that he and his co-writer, Scott Neustadter, sawRead Full Review

Coming up with a story for a movie every year for nearly forty-five years is enough to tax even the most gifted idea man, so it’s no wonder Woody Allen has borrowed some from timeRead Full Review

Every once in a while, it’s nice to get a reminder how lucky we are to be part of Western democracies, where we’re governed by institutions that allow for freedom of speech and the freedomRead Full Review

Nicolas Winding Refn’s follow-up to 2011’s Drive is stuffed with more violence, more neon, more flying limbs and more ruckus. Every year at the Cannes Film Festival, there’s a big name film that’s served up on aRead Full Review

I’m not sure any group of people are better at making uncomfortable films than the Danish. Led by Lars von Trier, their films generally explore topics that most people would rather just believe don’t exist.Read Full Review

Fruitvale Station is the kind of movie made if you want to be outraged in a post-George Zimmerman world. With the controversial “not guilty” verdict coming down just a day after Fruitvale‘s premiere, the cynic inside ofRead Full Review

Pacific Rim is about as good as I’d figured it would be (not very) and as dumb as I’d hoped it would be (epically). It’s completely aware of what it has to do as a movie,Read Full Review

I think we’ve all been part of a terrible vacation – they always seem to happen at some beach house, the heat adding to the discomfort – surrounded by people you don’t want to beRead Full Review