Screen
Review: ‘World War Z’ better than awful
For the seemingly infinite production companies behind World War Z, the must-see movie of next summer is Ninja Squirrel Poets* (*note: does not actually feature ninjas, squirrels or poetry). As has been well-publicized, Brad Pitt’s company, Plan B, snapped up the ...
Dumb wolf in smart sheep’s clothes
To review The Wolf of Wall Street at this stage of the game is to enter into a narrative feud with able critical champions on both sides...
Streaming cat blues: Week two
Apocalypse Later: Harold Camping vs. The End of the WorldAs 2010 drew to a close, TV preacher and Biblical mathematician, Harold Camping, predicted the...
‘An Education’ a good adaptation
"Why was I, a conventional Twickenham schoolgirl, running round London nightclubs with a con man?” British journalist Lynn Barber asks herself this question in her memoir, published earlier this year. The question has now led to a movie, which answers Barber’s query ...
Unnecessary 3-D
Comic effrontery is the Bic that lights the bong in the Harold & Kumar movies, but willfully strained outrageousness can turn sour like that. For a definition of “that,” there’s A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas, the weakest of the three. Here, the boy-men — now ...
Comedy, with flashes of Hughes
The ghost of John Hughes smiles upon Easy A, a film that freely and giddily borrows from and pays tribute to Hughes’ famous Holy Trinity of ’80s teen angst comedies...
Define ‘run’
At this point, there is just one Liam Neeson movie: Taken a Non-Stop Run All Night to Walk Among the Tombstones 3. Neeson isn’t in the midst of some Nicolas Cage supernova, in which an actor’s need to perpetually work and “get dat paper” creates an acting black hole ...
‘Nothing to do with death, everything to do with life’
How do you sum up a life in 500 words? That’s the problem Bruce Weber, veteran obituary writer for the New York Times, faces...
Dark side of ballet
Black Swan is a breathtaking, intense, horrifying and beautiful cinematic essay on obsession, maturity and the fine line between reality and fantasy, and it’s well worth seeing, regardless of whether you’re interested in ballet...
