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

Amour is about something that almost everybody has to deal with eventually, but that’s not talked about very much, and is almost never shown with such stark detail as it is here. Georges and Anne areRead Full Review

Holy Motors is a strange movie. But it seems strange in a David Lynchian sort of way, that seems to cry out for meaning – for a puzzle to be solved. (As opposed to strange inRead Full Review

I’d been staying away from Skyfall despite the craze over the latest James Bond film. Not because I had some reservation about the franchise, or that I had found that – based on trailers and reviews –Read Full Review

The gulf between the roles that Marion Cotillard plays in her commercial American films and the ones in her native language seems large enough the fit a cruise through. Consider the ferocity of her Oscar-winningRead Full Review

There’s something unbelievably infectious about David O. Russell’s latest movie, Silver Linings Playbook. It’s not that it’s particularly innovative or is a technical game-changer. It’s story is simple, almost predictable to a point. But it’s theRead Full Review

There probably isn’t a more difficult text that has been attempted at film adaptation more than Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. The material, so dense and involved, spirals over 860 pages and delves into issues beyond theRead Full Review

I wasn’t actually too excited about the concept of a film version of Yann Martel’s famed novel, Life of Pi, because how can you really tell such a story through cinema? Something about its tale seemedRead Full Review

There seems to be two kinds of people in the world. One type has read all of J.R.R. Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings books and sang the praises – high and loudly – of every frame ofRead Full Review

There’s a bit of an aura that surrounds two different figures involved in the making of the 2012 movie, Lincoln. One of the two is its director, Steven Spielberg, who may possibly end his career asRead Full Review

The Sessions is a very optimistic, good-natured film about some very dark, adult themes. It’s one thing to be a virgin when you’re over 40 (as Judd Apatow has so excellently shown us already), but it’sRead Full Review

There’s a dirty word in movies that comes to describe a certain pandering type of film that plays upon the easiest of human emotions to get cheap reactions. That word is sappy. I bring this upRead Full Review

Flight only works because of Denzel Washington. The film’s message is plodding and hackneyed, its journey is predictable, and its resolution is something out of a screenwriting class at Alcoholics Anonymous. But it all takes partRead Full Review

There’s a post-modern aspect to the screenplay of Seven Psychopaths that could be lost on a lot of viewers. A work of pretty extreme, complicated meta-fiction that seems to be a much more entertaining alternative to writer-directorRead Full Review

There is a very large (if somewhat transparent) part of Ben Affleck’s latest movie Argo that is a love song to cinema. Or at least, to the power of cinema. The power that moving pictures draped acrossRead Full Review

When you see a film adaptation as good as The Perks of Being a Wallflower, it ponders the question: why aren’t more authors trusted with the film adaptations of their work? Then you stand back andRead Full Review

Looper certainly looks cool and flashy in all the ways a movie needs to be in order to be a hit in contemporary Hollywood fashion. I’m sure it fancies itself a sort of modern day Blade Runner,Read Full Review

There was a moment in between 2002’s Punch-Drunk Love and 2007’s There Will Be Blood in which the career of Paul Thomas Anderson shifted in its view. It seemed like an incredibly long five years between those two movies,Read Full Review

Rashida Jones has been one of the loveliest supporting figures in movies for about five years now. I remember seeing her for the first time on The Office, but it was small roles in films like OurRead Full Review

Even without any introduction via the 2010 film The Expendables, you would know within ten minutes of watching The Expendables 2 that it is not a movie to be taken seriously. And why is that? Because before theRead Full Review

Films about the creative process don’t always work. There’s a kind of self-referencing egomania that the audience can sense when we see something written about writing. But Ruby Sparks, the new film from Little Miss Sunshine directors JonathanRead Full Review

If I had to choose a classic cinematic model that set a template for The Campaign, it would probably be Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. On the surface, it seems hard to imagine someone the likes ofRead Full Review

Occasionally, a film comes along and it’s very scope and cinematic vision leaves you frustrated with the limits of contemporary narrative films. Talk about a film that is astonishingly beautiful and wondrously innovative without JamesRead Full Review

It must take some kind of film event to bring me out of film review hibernation. Alas, The Dark Knight Rises comes along and leads me back to the keyboard, one year after my last post toRead Full Review

Horrible Bosses totally works because it accepts how absolutely preposterous it is. Everything in this film happens in a way that’s convenient to the characters and the story arc. In a way, that’s part of theRead Full Review

There’s a certain charm behind the kind of film that would give a dog subtitles for dialogue. This is an act that could always come off as campy if done gratuitously, and worse yet, couldRead Full Review

I feel like I can say this with certainty: anybody who doesn’t like Tom Hanks is probably a very unhappy person. Growing up in the 90’s, it was hard to miss him as he starredRead Full Review

I defy anybody to give any kind of definitive opinion on The Tree of Life based on one viewing. Anyone. The film is too slippery. Too unwilling to stick to its own narrative which so desperately hangsRead Full Review

The similarities are obvious. The allusions are there. There’s a reason people continue to talk about Super 8 as if it’s some hybrid of The Goonies, Close Encounters, and E.T. That’s not just because of the content (group of child protagonists,Read Full Review

In the world of American cinema, there are two constants: over-saturated summer films and Woody Allen. The 75-year-old filmmaker has just about made one film per year since 1969. Through he 70’s and 80’s, heRead Full Review

I guess no one should ever question a winning recipe, and lord knows the filmmakers behind this sequel to The Hangover have any qualms with it, even though it tastes so familiar. The Hangover Part II is a nearRead Full Review

Will Ferrell has taken only a precious few ventures into dramatic territory, but Everything Must Go certainly counts amongst his darkest characters. There are no traces of Ron Burgundy or Ricky Bobby here, but instead the portraitRead Full Review

It seems like Kristen Wiig has been the funniest lady in the room for the last few years. Whether it be her consistently brilliant work on Saturday Night Live or her four minutes of pure comedic blissRead Full Review

There’s something particularly sweet about how bizarre a film like Hesher is. Think about this: here, we have a movie led by a character that speaks in so many non sequiturs that we eventually just get usedRead Full Review

I cannot say whether or not Duncan Jones is a fan of the 1993 Bill Murray film, Groundhog Day, but I may suggest to him to check out that film’s screenplay. In it, Phil (a characterRead Full Review

When I originally saw the trailer for Win Win, I turned to a friend of mine and asked, “Does that movie look really good? Because I’m at a point in my life where anything that starsRead Full Review

Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre is considered to be amongst the greatest of the Gothic-Romantic novels of its time. When you read it, with its underlying sexual tension chastising the hypocritical nature of 1840’s culture, you almost haveRead Full Review

In Cedar Rapids, we are given a group of insurance rep misfits that couldn’t be any more buffoonish, yet couldn’t be any more sincere. There’s a certain level of warmth within the people we meet inRead Full Review

Somewhere within The Adjustment Bureau is a very compelling romance, and even better, a wonderful farce. Furthermore, the film stirs serious moral questions about predestination and existentialism. These three aspects (the romance, the farce, the existentialism) areRead Full Review

You may never see a film that appreciates faces the way that Another Year does. Not the kind of faces we’re used to staring at in most Hollywood films, but a different kind. Faces with cracks andRead Full Review

Barney Panofsky is the kind of character that is tailor-made for an actor with the talent of Paul Giamatti. Grumpy, condescending, always quick to jump to judgment. How is it that Giamatti is able toRead Full Review

There are certain film actors that are imbued with such wonderful likability that they fill their screen characters with such unavoidable watchability. I think Sally Hawkins is the newest member of this group and in MadeRead Full Review

I’m sure that it’s tough being royalty. It no longer holds the political stature that it did throughout history, but it still carries with it the emotional burden of being the face of an entireRead Full Review