Search for Jonathan

In the wake of the rousingly successful Star Trek: First Contact, the movie that brought the franchise back from the moribund wasteland of entries 5, 6, and 7, comes feature film #9, Star Trek: Insurrection. The good news for Trekkers and casual m...

Middle episodes in trilogies have the potential to be fundamentally dissatisfying. Thankfully, George Lucas has managed to avoid that pitfall for Episode II of the Star Wars saga, Attack of the Clones. Admittedly, the primary purpose of this film...

Attack of the Clones suffers from "middle episode syndrome" - the tendency of the second volume in a trilogy to feel incomplete and, as a result of that incompleteness, to fail to satisfy. (A problem George Lucas was able to avoid with The ...

Upon its release in 1984, Jonathan Demme's Stop Making Sense was hailed by many critics as the "greatest concert film of all time." The picture, which captured a live concert performance given by the Talking Heads, used state-of-the-art direct-to-...

Upon its release in 1984, Jonathan Demme's Stop Making Sense was hailed by many critics as the "greatest concert film of all time." The movie, which captured a live concert performance given by the Talking Heads, used state-of-the-art direct-t...

When The Sure Thing was released in 1985, it was out of step with the times. Teen comedies in those years were saturated with sex and broad humor. Romance and realism (even to a modest degree) were undesirable relics of a bygone era. Nevertheles...

Surrogates was not pre-screened for critics. Most of the time, I understand when a studio takes this route - it's a way to avoid undue negative publicity before the release of a movie that is recognized behind-the-scenes as being a turd. Once in ...

Hamburg. Nazi Germany. 1939. Peter (Robert Sean Leonard), Thomas (Christian Bale), and Arvid (Frank Whaley) are three "Swing Kids" -- young rebel Germans who have fallen in love with the forbidden: American movies, British fashion, and Swing musi...

Michelle Williams must have an affinity for appearing in movies about melancholy relationships. Although Take This Waltz is by no means as big a downer as Blue Valentine, neither does it adhere to Hollywood formulas about how romantic dramas should...

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the 2014 iteration of a franchise that has been a kids' staple for more than 25 years, is a close cousin to Transformers. Both gained mainstream popularity as a result of toys and TV shows, both have die-hard followin...