This review contains spoilers. While it’s probably true that a movie can recover from a weak beginning, a shaky ending proves a more formidable challenge. Such is the case with director Rodrigo Cortes’ Red Lights, about a pair of university scientists out to debunk…
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Fantasy and reality collide in Ruby Sparks, a fractured love story about a wunderkind young novelist suffering from writer’s block who manifests his perfect muse from the keys of a battered old typewriter. What he does with her once she arrives is what makes…
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Michael Winterbottom’s Trishna, a retelling of Thomas Hardy’s classic 1871 novel Tess of the D’Urbervilles set in modern-day India, is a sumptuous picture featuring a solid performance from the very beautiful Freida Pinto as the tragic heroine struggling with issues of love and class. …
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I’m not sure it’s possible for any movie to live up to the deafening din of hype and expectation faced by Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises, on the heels of its 2008 predecessor’s $1 billion haul at the box office and legion of…
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Michelle Williams has such a delicate, cherubic emotionality, fully writ on her peaches and cream cheeks, always dancing on the edge of great vulnerability—she really has emerged as perhaps one of the very best of her young generation. Her tour-de-force as Marilyn Monroe in…
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Is it enough to just say that Beasts of the Southern Wild, this year’s Sundance Grand Jury Prize winner that also captured the Caméra d’Or at Cannes, is the best American film of 2012? Part coming-of-age story, part anthropological examination, part story of community…
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The cynic in me says that The Amazing Spider-Man, the reboot of the Marvel movie franchise that comes just seven years on the heels of the last film in the series, 2005’s Spider-Man 3, is merely a studio marketing move to cash in on…
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The main reason to see People Like Us, about a hotshot who does some growing up after returning home for his father’s funeral, is the performance of Elizabeth Banks as an down-on-her-luck single mother with a lot of baggage, valiantly trudging along until she…
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There’s been a lot of talk about how Magic Mike, the “male stripper movie” based on producer-star Channing Tatum’s early experiences and directed by Steven Soderbergh, won’t play to heterosexual men—and how this may inevitably spell box-office trouble. And from the film’s marketing campaign,…
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