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

This is the End seems like the epitome of comedic success. You make enough hit movie comedies and you too can be given $32 million to make a movie with all of your friends, not evenRead Full Review

If Much Ado About Nothing does anything for the image of pop filmmaker Joss Whedon, it surely extends the range of fanboy-ism that is so synonymous with his image. Filmmakers have re-done Shakespeare often, and will probably continueRead Full Review

This year’s new Sofia Coppola movie dissects celebrity through an unfamiliar prism. In other words, this year’s new Sofia Coppola movie is a lot like every other Sofia Coppola movie. I imagine that growing upRead Full Review

Richard Linklater’s Before… series is easily one of my favorite film trilogies of all time. Born in 1995, from the dialogue exercise Before Sunrise, which took a young Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy and put them in Vienna,Read Full Review

Documentaries simply don’t unveil themselves the way that Stories We Tell does. At once, a story about a family, it transforms itself into a story about a mother, than a daughter, two separate fathers before ultimately becomingRead Full Review

The cinema of Noah Baumbach is usually bitter, awkward in the most cringe-worthy definitions of the word, and derivative references from the various poles of the cinematic/literary world. It’s hard not to watch the firstRead Full Review

The Abrams reboot of the Star Trek franchise has been one of the biggest success stories out of Hollywood these last few years. It felt like something unlike the Marvel Iron Man/Avengers reboots that worked mainly because A) theyRead Full Review

While watching the latest film adaptation of The Great Gatsby, I tried to imagine if I would think it was as much of a failure if I wasn’t comparing it to the great American novel byRead Full Review

In the entire twenty-first century comic book movie explosion, no actor has better fit into his superhero role than Robert Downey Jr. has with Iron Man. From the very beginning, the boozing, schmoozing apathy that radiatesRead Full Review

The degree to which Matthew McConaughey has attempted to change the trajectory of his career these last few years fascinates me, I must admit. He had spent the better part of the last two decadesRead Full Review

Despite Terrence Mallick’s already formidable reputation, Tree of Life seemed to come out of nowhere two years ago as this breathtakingly beautiful, yet frustratingly whisper-y meditation on life and the universe. It was Mallick’s biggest hit sinceRead Full Review

There’s no other filmmaker that I actively dislike more than Michael Bay. His films create visions of a certain America that I want no part of, ripe with men that think only with their musclesRead Full Review

In the middle decades of the twentieth century, a powerful literary movement thundered through America called the New Criticism. It was started by John Crowe Ransom and popularized by towering literary figures like T.S. Eliot.Read Full Review

Harmony Korine enjoys blurring the line between trash and art, and attempting to expose that the line the separates the two is a lot thinner than most people realize. A film like his Trash Humpers from 2009Read Full Review

The two Fanning sisters, Dakota and now Elle, both have seemed to possess a delicate, but occasionally powerful screen presence that seems beyond their young ages. They’ve both been working since they were young children,Read Full Review

In 1988, Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet caved into international political pressure and allowed the people to have a choice: elect him to lead for the next eight years or choose to take him out ofRead Full Review

Steven Soderbergh’s latest film already has the interesting asterisk of possibly being the final theatrical release of this celebrated filmmaker’s career (to be sure, Soderbergh’s final film is setting up to be the much-anticipated HBORead Full Review

The last time Gus van Sant and Matt Damon worked together on a film, they produced Good Will Hunting. Hunting became a huge splash, won a couple of Oscars, ran through a gauntlet of cruel backlash haterism andRead Full Review

The 2004 Tsunami disaster was one of the biggest natural disasters in our memory, an unrelenting force that blew through several countries and wrecked havoc unlike any we’ve ever seen. The Impossible takes a peak at thisRead Full Review

I’ve forever been fascinated by Kathryn Bigelow’s career. For two decades she seemed to succeed in a man’s business making “manly” products. But more than that, her projects were also so varied and striking. There’sRead Full Review

For various reasons, musicals don’t sell in Hollywood like they used to. As movies began to gravitate more towards sensibility and realism in the late 1960’s, the spectacle of the Hollywood musical fell out ofRead Full Review

The last two movies that Quentin Tarantino has made deal with the two biggest eras of racial injustice in America’s two-plus centuries of existence. His first one, 2009’s Inglourious Basterds, dealt with World War II, inRead Full Review