Screen
A patient Western
At one point in Meek’s Cutoff, set in 1845, the frontier settler played by the excellent, plain-spoken Michelle Williams fires two warning shots after an alarming encounter with a Native American. Hurriedly she loads the rifle with gunpowder and ammunition, while ...
Lonely Hearts’ Club
Let’s be honest, Love Is All You Need (or Den Skaldede Frisør if Danish is more than a donut to you) is basically redundant escapist fantasy. But when the fantasy services the desires of middle-aged women struggling with uncompassionate husbands and cancer and not ...
‘Spy Next Door’ not worth a ticket
I'm a lukewarm Jackie Chan fan. He’s been in some terrific films, notably Rush Hour and The Forbidden Kingdom, but he’s also been in a lot of movies that are stupid, including the Rush Hour sequels and the ghastly Around the World in 80 Days...
Top 10 films of the decade
The first decade of this millennium has been an uncertain one. Terrorist attacks, wars, and financial meltdowns have made us feel vulnerable...
These guys have all the fun
Somebody asked me, what would be a dream project of yours?” director Douglas Tirola recounts. “I immediately had this vision of a book on my shelf at home that I have had since I was a teenager — the 10th anniversary collection of National Lampoon...
Next-best thing
Operatic characters are larger than life. Especially when projected on a 20-foot tall movie screen...
Ice, ice maybe
I’m not saying that the impoverished are going to grab axes and violently murder the wealthy elite. But… Writer/director Joon-ho Bong’s Snowpiercer does what the sci-fi genre does better than any other cinematic medium: examines modern life by asking a surreal “what ...
In need of altar-ations
Complaining about the length of a film can be a cop-out, a lazy way to avoid dissecting actual content in favor of basically whining about how valuable your free time is. But jokes about The Five-Year Engagement being long enough to legally make its audience common...
More suspense from ‘Whiteout,’ please
Here's a really cool idea for a film: you're a U.S. Marshal working at a United States research facility in Antarctica, helping keep the peace. Like a campus cop, your primary job is dealing with drunks and minor thefts, but you're hoping that a major crime will ...
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...

















