Search for Wood

Sure as the turning of the leaves, this time of the year, fresh with the scent of Oscars to come, brings the release of a new Woody Allen motion picture. Two years ago, his Fall contribution was Husbands and Wives. Last year, it was Manhattan Mur...

Note: The Cabin in the Woods works best if left unspoiled. Its impact relies not on a single unexpected twist but upon the cumulative impact of little unanticipated actions and incidents. It's virtually impossible to write anything coherent without...

With Cassandra's Dream, we may finally be seeing confirmation of what many have suspected for years: that Woody Allen's period of greatness as a filmmaker is over. A few years ago, Match Point provided hope that we might be observing a re-invention...

Woody Allen's 1998 feature entry, Celebrity, is arguably his weakest film in half a decade, failing to reach the level of entertaining mediocrity attained by such middle-of-the-road features as Mighty Aphrodite and Deconstructing Harry, and falling...

Clint Eastwood's Changeling falls into a common trap: by trying to do too much, it accomplishes too little. If the film feels overstuffed and poorly focused, that's because the screenplay, credited to Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Straczynski, atte...

I'm not a Zac Efron hater; I thought he did a solid job in Me and Orson Welles, a film that showcased his ability to act when given the opportunity. However, in Charlie St. Cloud (as in his previous outing for director Burr Steers, 17 Again), Zefr...

There's a skill to adapting a novel that not all filmmakers have. This is especially evident if a book is not inherently cinematic and requires more "massaging" to shape it into a form capable of fitting comfortably into a two-hour time...