Actually, yes, the United States did flirt with eugenics for a while, and Nazi Germany did try to vaporize whole populations. But the end results of those experiments were a lot less wholesome than the plot points in Captain America: The First Avenger.   Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) is a schmoe too wimpy to serve […]

This week affords a unique opportunity to come in from the cold of the multiplex. You know what’s playing on the big screens. Did you also know that Thai writer-director Apichatpong “Joe” Weerasethakul’s Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, the top-prize winner at last year’s Cannes, has arrived on DVD? Uncle Boonmee Who […]

Buck Brannaman is no ordinary horse trainer, which is unfortunate for some. Thanks to Cindy Meehl’s film about him, ordinary horse trainers now have a lot to live up to.

This must begin with a shameful confession, which is that the trailer for Larry Crowne made me want to see some horrible fate befall Julia Roberts. Look, I know it’s terrible. I barely even know how to hurt another person, let alone a balloon animal like the one Roberts plays in Larry Crowne. But if movies starring Tom Hanks have taught me anything, they have taught me that it’s important to do the right thing.

Regular readers of this column know that Super 8 left me cold. That film had been billed as one of the good ones. But that’s in a world—to borrow the blockbuster-trailer parlance—where “good” means predictably “shallow and sentimental.” As a grudging habitue and tiny-paycheck-collecting parasite of Hollywood excess, I know all too well that the […]

“From writer-director J.J. Abrams,” the poster says in big letters, “and producer Steven Spielberg,” in letters just as big. That triumph of dual brand-identity marketing is the first thing people talk about, and Super 8’s salient feature.

Maybe it’s to Woody Allen’s advantage that his golden age is presumed to be behind him. It makes it easy to accept this 75-year-old writer-director as a good-humored nostalgist who understands the basic problem with nostalgia: There’s no future in it.

We have the X-Men franchise to thank for the last decade’s numbing proliferation of comic book superhero movies. And so we should hold it to a higher standard.

 It’s not the worst, as group-of-dudes comedy sequels go. We’re not talking Ghostbusters II here. But of course we weren’t talking Ghostbusters to begin with. We’re talking The Hangover. So this is a little weird: It’s like expecting more and expecting less at the same time. Ed Helms, Bradley Cooper and Zach Galifianakis take the […]

You would not be wrong to wonder if it’s even possible to get fired up for a new movie version of Charlotte Brontë’s 1847 novel