Burton’s Alice in Wonderland is messed up in some ways—we’ll get to that in a second—but it’s seriously beautiful at intervals that command attention. There’s a war theme in it that’s pursued with surprising gravity. Example: the Mad Hatter (Johnny…

On Shutter Island, there’s a lighthouse where patients are supposedly taken to be lobotomized. The movie has about thirty-five shots of this lighthouse against a gloomy sky, so many that you begin to wonder if director Martin Scorsese has had…

For a good time, call Robert Downey Jr. Of course, some people don’t want to have a good time. That’s one of the mysterious facts of our modern lives, and that’s why there’s a market for films like Precious: Based…

What are the best movies of the decade? How the hell should I know? To hear the critics tell it, it’s Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire, plus a lot of other solemn bummers I didn’t see. However,…

Avatar turns out to be the one about the white guy who gets mixed up with Noble Savages and likes them so much he goes native, right before the big battle. So no surprises about the plot. But what about…

Sometimes you just want to see a lot of people die, but if you did anything about it in real life, you’d get entangled in a lot of red tape. So you head off to the cinema instead and watch…

I’m morbidly devoted to the works of Charles Dickens. It’s a childhood aberration. At a young age I started reading whatever books were on the family shelves and bonded with Dickens and Twain before I had a fully formed cranium,…

I finally got around to seeing Paranormal Activity, the low-budget ghost movie that’s making so much money. It’s spinning through the predictable cycle already charted by The Blair Witch Project ten years ago: 1) early fan buzz and glowing reviews,…

By now the Coen brothers are so great at filmmaking they’re actually scary. They started out twenty-five years ago with massive cinematic talent and the finest sensibilities in the modern world, and they’ve worked and worked till now they can…

Capitalism: A Love Story is a fantastic slap-upside-the-head film, just what we need right now. It’s been playing a week in New York and Los Angeles, and just opened wide. The reviews are “mixed.” Critics say it’s just Michael Moore…

If you think our culture is totally, horribly, permanently screwed up, go see The Informant! Because it’s a gallows-humor study of how/why we are totally, horribly, permanently screwed up, so it gives you an opportunity to consider the question. But…

Extract is so bad its rottenness becomes a source of fascination, which is a good thing, because there’s nothing else to sustain your interest while the 89 minute dud drags by. It’s all Mike Judge’s fault, that much is clear….

So I finally saw Inglourious Basterds the other night. I’ll admit, I was more than ready to avoid Tarantino’s new film, even after reading Eileen’s enticing review. The film sounded wrong on every level–what could possibly be good about another…

When I heard Quentin Tarantino was making a Dirty Dozen-like action film set in WWII, I groaned in spirit. With all the amazing eras and dazzling historical figures and slaughterhouse horrors not yet represented in cinema, we’re going to visit…

There are a couple of strokes of genius in District 9 that renew one’s hopes for the future of genre film. One is casting Sharlto Copley, who’s not a trained actor, as protagonist Wikus van der Merwe, a dweeby South…

Finally, fa-HINE-ally, someone has made a proper comedy. Armando Iannucci, to be exact, with In the Loop, his annihilating satire of recent Anglo-American misadventures in the Middle East. It’s getting fantastic reviews and it deserves every one of them. It’s…

So Harry Potter, the latest one. Making a lot of money. Yep. How many more to go? Ten? Oh, only two? Well, good, that means they’ll finish up before the kids turn thirty.

Public Enemies is an oddly soft, slow, elegiac film, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Some of my best friends are elegiac films. But it seems a regrettable approach to its main subject, John Dillinger, if you know anything at…

Washington acting like a person Director Tony Scott ought to put up a statue to Denzel Washington in his sculpture garden, then pray to it at least three times a day to express his gratitude for the way the actor…

I’m supposed to be reviewing The Hangover here, but the problem is I saw it when hung over and can’t remember much of it. That’s what you call “irony.” (Manhattans and red wine, if you must know.) I’d heard that…