On 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…
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There’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…
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Martin 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…
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A 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…
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The 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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Emma Thompson gives a performance for the ages in Saving Mr. Banks, the new picture chronicling Walt Disney’s pursuit of humorless Mary Poppins author P.L. Travers, who in 1961 traveled from London to Hollywood to entertain signing away the film rights to her deeply…
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It’s certain that some will find Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave, the incredible true story of a free African-American musician from New York kidnapped and sold into slavery in the south circa 1841, too unflinching in its depiction of barbarism. But know this…
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Paul Greengrass’ tension epic Captain Philips is a slick and satisfying movie treatment of the 2009 hijacking of an American cargo ship off the coast of Africa, and the subsequent kidnapping of its titular commander at the hands of four, small-time Somali opportunists who…
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We so often indulge in hyperbole about movies that when one comes along that truly merits such, simply saying it’s extraordinary doesn’t seem enough. But that’s the case with Alfonso Cuarón’s magnificent Gravity, a simple yet profound meditation on survival starring Sandra Bullock as…
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