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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...

It is an accepted truth that adapting a sublime novel does not always result in a sublime movie. To an extent, this is the problem with Never Let Me Go, Alex Garland's adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguru's book. The film's tone, which attempts to captur...

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...

News of the World, based on the 2016 novel by Paulette Jiles, is a road trip Western where the genre serves less as the focus than as a backdrop to the relationship between the paternalistic Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd (Tom Hanks) and the 10-y...

It's strange how the concept of two people wandering around a city at night falling in love has come of age in 2008. First, there was In Search of a Midnight Kiss. Now there's Nick and Nora's Infinite Playlist. Of course, Richard Linklater can c...

Unconventionality is not always an asset and, in attempting to experiment with offbeat techniques to encourage viewer engagement, director RaMell Ross has inadvertently done the opposite, creating distance instead of immersion. In film, shaky cam-...

Into the calm before the box-office storm of The Lost World rises Night Falls on Manhattan, Sidney Lumet's triumphant return to worthwhile movie-making. The director of such memorable films as Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, and Network has been in a ...

The Night Listener is an eerie, occasionally disturbing motion picture focused on the differences between perception and reality. The film exists in the gray area separating drama from psychological thriller, although the mood is in many ways more...

At the time of The Night of the Hunter’s release, the motion picture industry was in flux. Beset by the perceived threat presented by television, the studios were looking for ways to go bigger and better: color, advanced sound, widescreen as...

There are many words that could be used to describe Night Watch, but "conventional" and "dull" are not among them. The film has the twin virtues of being bold and dizzying, but it features a cramped and chaotic narrative that concludes with a clim...