Search for 2011

Over the last 20 years of his career, Steven Spielberg has often coupled a crowd-pleasing would-be blockbuster with a more serious-minded project. Thus, in 1993, he released Jurassic Park in tandem with Schindler's List. In 1997, there were The Los...

I don't know much about Mixed Martial Arts except that it appears to be an extreme form of regulated fighting, with combatants using a variety of tactics to bring their opponent to heel. In Warrior, Gavin O'Connor's surprisingly elegiac drama about...

The primary draw for Water for Elephants is the pairing of Reese Witherspoon and Robert Pattinson (ignore the ten year age gap) in a love story based on the best-selling novel by Sara Gruen. Sadly, passion and romance are two ingredients missing fr...

After the twin disappointments of Vanilla Sky (which critics generally liked but the public did not) and Elizabethtown (which was equally dismissed by critics and the general movie-going populace), Cameron Crowe has hunkered down in relative obscur...

Tilda Swinton is a chameleon unafraid of any subject matter, no matter how hard-hitting or difficult. She has appeared in one of the most emotionally crushing films I have ever seen, Tim Roth's The War Zone, and her performance in We Need to Talk a...

The easiest way to summarize my reaction to X-Men: First Class is with a shrug. The movie is competently made (and not in 3-D, thankfully), has some nice action sequences, tells its story with workmanlike efficiency, and will probably please fans o...

Diablo Cody has a distinctive voice. You can hear it in Juno. You can hear it in Jennifer's Body. You can hear it in United States of Tara. And you can hear it in Young Adult. After a while, however, the uniqueness of what Cody has to say and how ...

When assessing the small motion picture sub-genre of the "fantasy comedy," it's necessary to acknowledge that the impregnable pinnacle is occupied by Rob Reiner's The Princess Bride, a classic whose prominence may never be challenged. Your Highnes...

Zookeeper is no Mall Cop. The 2009 comedy, Paul Blart: Mall Cop, may have been one of the most unexpectedly pleasant movie-going surprises of the past few years. It was better than it had a right to be and convinced audiences that, in addition to f...