Sarah’s Key would like to reassure you that there is still a place in this world—or at least in its movie theaters—for a grave Holocaust drama of child endangerment.

What’s very clever about Moneyball is that it’s so inside baseball, it’s inside out. The truth is that this is more of a business movie than a sports movie.

First, a warning: Don’t try this at home. However much it may seem like a piece of cake to build a whole movie around a lazy, lonely, corrupt, faux-racist, foul-mouthed provincial Irish cop, in fact it is a delicate art. Consider The Guard, wherein writer-director John Michael McDonagh, whose brother Martin wrote and directed In […]

Contagion is named for the film’s most developed character. That might seem unfair to the human actors, who play their parts—Marion Cotillard an epidemiologist, Matt Damon a paragon of endurance, Laurence Fishburne a CDC boss, Jude Law a blogger-alarmist, Gwyneth Paltrow a first casualty and Kate Winslet a damage controller—but that’s the nature of the […]

When I found out what The Debt was really about, I greeted it with a sense of relief. Here’s what this movie is not: some hectoring documentary about Congress figuring out its financial super committee.  After a strong showing at film festivals, and chatter that it may be a 2011 awards contender, The Debt, starring […]

Its ending reportedly tampered with since Sundance, the indie-scented dysfunctional-family comedy Our Idiot Brother winds up flattering its complacent middle-class audience, but not for any real reason—there’s no medicine going down with this sugar. To try and imagine what the Weinstein Company might have worried about is to find oneself quoting the movie’s own doofus parolee hero: “You know what? You know what? Wow.”

By modern movie standards, the polite action comedy of bumbling criminals seems awfully quaint. Might some refreshment be had from the rude slacker comedy of utterly imbecilic criminals? Aziz Anasari (left) and Jesse Eisenberg star in the chuckle-worthy bank heist flick 30 Minutes or Less. Not from this one. Given the actual 2003 incident in […]

As a title, Beginners sounds a note of humility, albeit self-consciously. Certainly that makes it the right name for writer-director Mike Mills’ touching, autobiographical new film. In it, a commitment-phobic graphic artist is supportive but bewildered when his father comes out of the closet at 75—just in time to face a terminal illness.

Once in a while, even the most tried and true narrative formula needs to be repackaged. Or so it seemed to the people at DreamWorks, who must’ve said while brainstorming Cowboys & Aliens, “So how about this: a thing meets another thing, but not the other thing you might expect! It’s so crazy, it might work!”

Terrence Malick, the Rhodes scholar-turned-reclusive-director and extreme partisan of The Big Picture, returns this summer with only his fifth film in 38 years.