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While many of William Shakespeare’s plays have been preserved for posterity, not much is known about the man beyond a handful of biographical scraps. That vacuum has long invited authors and screenwriters to fill in the blanks. The most famous e...

Dark, visceral, and brimming with suspense, Hanna is not the follow-up to Pride & Prejudice and Atonement one might expect from director Joe Wright. Nevertheless, here it is: an intriguing, original thriller that owes as much of a debt to the like...

Harriet Tubman’s story as presented in Kasi Lemmons’ new feature, Harriet, is inspirational and crowd-pleasing. One of the most heroic figures on the mid-19th century abolitionist movement and the best remembered conductor on the Undergrou...

With movies like The High Note that tell familiar stories, it’s all about how things are presented. Details matter. Performances are key and the “little things” that give the narrative a unique flavor are to be savored. In imparting the ...

At the heart of The Holdovers lies a cliché – something about life-lessons imparted and accepted from a mismatched companion – but the manner in which director Alexander Payne and writer David Hemingson approach this familiar trope imbues it ...

The question of whether actor George Reeves committed suicide or was murdered will go down in history as one of Hollywood's great unsolved mysteries. Allen Coulter's Hollywoodland, a fictionalized account (it uses both apocryphal stories and confi...

Since stepping away from working with his brother Joel, Ethan Coen has found a new creative partner in his wife, Trisha Cooke. Honey Don't! marks their second collaboration and, like Drive-Away Dolls, it revels in B-movie excess. That shouldn't be...

Televangelism and those who practice the dubious form of money-driven religiosity represent low-hanging fruit when it comes to satire. A lot of the material – Jimmy Swaggert crying crocodile tears, the eyes of Tammy Faye, etc. – comes across a...

Hyde Park on Hudson represents the odd marriage of an uninteresting, borderline-creepy "romance" and a peek behind the scenes of a notable but unsung historical event. 2012 has seen dramatizations of eras from the administrations of two of America'...

There are those, including the distributor, who would like audiences to believe that The Ice Harvest is a comedy. At first glance, that's not so hard to accept. After all, director Harold Ramis was one of the Ghostbusters co-writers and scored a ...