Search for Michael

Anne Fontaine's Nathalie... has taken 2 1/2 years to attain U.S. distribution, and even that will be just a limited peek in select art house venues before a quick turnaround onto DVD. (A medium in which it has been available in France since 2004.)...

Nostalgia can be a wonderful thing, especially when a director tweaks it and plays with it. With Nebraska, Alexander Payne, working from a screenplay credited to Bob Nelson, targets a very specific slice of Americana that has often been romanticize...

Neighbors contains many of the qualities that make raunchy, profane comedies a popular commodity: sex, T&A, drugs, a barrage of four-letter words, and slapstick of the broadest kind. At first glance, one might be tempted to lump Neighbors into the ...

It’s the same sad story: a small movie becomes an unexpected success and, for purely financial reasons, a sequel is commissioned. The follow-up proves not only to be creatively bankrupt but a disappointment on all levels and thereby tarnishes t...

Nell, Jodie Foster's return to dramatic acting following a flirtation with Maverick's action-comedy, is an entirely human movie. In this lush, green world of rolling hills and crystal pools, technology is an unwelcome intruder; civilization, a thr...

Considering how ubiquitous social media has become in the early 21st century, it’s surprising how few films have used this cultural element as the foundation for a movie plot (rather than just window dressing). Nerve seeks to rectify this overs...

Welcome to cyberspace, the newest locale for the action-adventure film. Borrowing heavily from Alfred Hitchcock and John Grisham, director Irwin Winkler reduces a potentially-fascinating premise to the spearhead of a routine thriller. The Net sta...

Strictly speaking, Never Back Down is not a remake, but it might as well be. The premise is familiar: underdog achieves self respect through training with a master then puts it all together for the big fight. Like a pop song suffering from overpl...

It’s said that one of the reasons George Lucas deferred making the Star Wars prequels from the mid-1980s to the late 1990s is because the special effects technology he needed wasn’t available. I was reminded of this while watching Wolfgang...

New York, I Love You is the second in a planned five-film series of anthologies that explores different meanings of love. The first movie, Paris, I Love You, was released in 2007. There are also projected excursions to Jerusalem, Rio, and Shangha...