If you come away from Shana Feste’s Endless Love with nothing else, you’ll have seen two beautiful people with beautiful bodies in beautiful settings and, for a brief time at the beginning of the picture, some beautiful moments of falling into first love. In…
Read MoreIf you can get past the central premise—and that’s a big if—in Jason Reitman’s Labor Day, you’ll be rewarded with rich performances and an unabashed romanticism that, while perhaps unbelievable, also somehow works. Set in 1987 on the outskirts of a Mayberry-esque hamlet, it’s…
Read MoreThe scandalous true story of a grand passion requited with bitter consequences, The Invisible Woman is an impeccably acted picture about the adulterous affair that destroyed Charles Dickens’ marriage, the reputation of his young mistress and galvanized 19th Century England society. Starring Felicity Jones…
Read MoreJuliette, Julianne, Margo and Tracy — In August: Osage County, the Year’s Best Ensemble Tackles Unhealed Family Wounds, Secrets

You won’t find a better acting ensemble this year than the sprawling cast of August: Osage County, the new film adaptation of Tracy Letts’ celebrated, Pulitzer Prize-winning play, about an extended—and highly dysfunctional—southern family reuniting on the Oklahoma plains after the patriarch’s death. This…
Read MoreOn the Steppenwolf and Broadway stages, Tracy Letts’ Pulitzer Prize and Tony winning August: Osage County, a portrait of family turmoil to end them all, was a galvanizing experience—a three-act, 3 ½ hour showdown between estranged family members gathering on the sweltering Oklahoma plains…
Read MoreIt’s a good problem to have when your first cut of the top ten movies of the year comes in at about thirty. In 2013, the field was so dense and competition so intense, with one seemingly terrific film after another opening well…
Read MoreThere’s a good movie somewhere in Ben Stiller’s The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, but he hasn’t quite delivered it. Based on James Thurber’s 1939 New Yorker short story and subsequent 1947 screen adaptation starring Danny Kaye, Stiller has taken a screenplay stuck in…
Read MoreMartin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio are at the top of their respective games with The Wolf of Wall Street, the crown jewel of American film in 2013. At 71, Scorsese returns to glorious form with a wild ride of a movie, an unrepentant and…
Read MoreA sensationally entertaining actors’ show—exactly what we expect from director David O. Russell—is the engine behind American Hustle, a smart piece of movie enjoyment so much fun to watch that it stands with Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street as a pair of…
Read MoreThe beating heart of an artist in a tailspin fuels the Coen Brothers lovely little period picture, Inside Llewyn Davis, a beautifully rendered portrait of a struggling folk guitarist, played in a star-making performance by Oscar Isaac, circa 1961 Greenwich Village. In a season…
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