Screen
Squash the spider, man!
Spider-man’s new costume looks swell, and Emma Stone is charming. Those are the only two things about The Amazing Spider-Man 2 I didn’t hate with the fiery anger of a thousand exploding suns. Every other performance, every last bit of dialogue and plot, every ...
Not genius, but still good
The most startling shot in Paranormal Activity 3 is something even the film’s determined unbelievers would concede to be damnably effective...
Funny noir die
Sporting dialogue hotter than a recently spent shell casing and comedy slightly less dark than a necrophiliac stand-up comedian’s set, The Nice Guys targets...
Stuck in the middle with you
Professor Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti) loves history. Not just any old history but antiquity: Greeks, Romans, Sumerians — you name ’em, Paul knows all...
Let’s movie
For more than a decade, cinema’s faithful have flocked to the promised land every spring for the TCM Classic Film Festival: One long weekend...
The limits of empathy
The man looks unassuming. He’s Teodoro Ulber (Nathán Pinzón), a middle-aged English professor, short and squat with proper manners and nice clothes. He’s timid...
‘Leap Year’ fits romantic comedy mold
If chemistry were all, then the sparks Amy Adams and Matthew Goode set off would be enough in "Leap Year," a romantic comedy in which those sparks never quite ignite...
Page turner
John Ford is cinema. Born in Portland, Maine, in 1894 — just as motion picture cameras were first being put to good use —...
Fight the power
From the late 1990s to the early years of the 21st century, some of the best in cinema came out of Iran. Populated with directors like Asghar Farhadi, Abbas Kiarostami, Mohsen Makhmalbaf and Jafar Panahi, Iran’s postmodern renaissance showed that nothing was safe ...
Snooze cruise
What’s your level of interest here? It’s been 15 years and 30-plus features — not to mention TV and streaming series — since Iron...
‘Imaginarium’ a disaster, incomprehensible
It should have been the must-see movie of the Christmas season, directed and co-written by the critically acclaimed Terry Gilliam (Brazil, 12 Monkeys) and featuring the marquee cast of Johnny Depp, Jude Law, Colin Farrell and, in his final role, Heath Ledger...
