Screen

Truly, I am madly, deeply in love with the film version of Where the Wild Things Are. Not since Robert Altman took on Popeye a generation ago, and lost, has a major director addressed such a well-loved, all-ages title. This time everything works, from tip to tail, ...

David Norris (Matt Damon) is a young go-getter New York politician who has a chance encounter with the quirky, engaging Elise Sellas (Emily Blunt), a ballerina who captures his attention immediately. Strange forces are at work and Norris is assaulted and wakes up in ...

Operatic characters are larger than life. Especially when projected on a 20-foot tall movie screen...

In its own sweetly bombastic way, the 2008 remake of Journey to the Center of the Earth did the job, the job being a 21st-century 3-D bash starring Brendan Fraser — an actor who gives his all to the green screen, every time — and loosely based on the 19th-century ...

Know how to give mild G-rated fare a little something special? Cast Sandra Oh as an elementary school teacher who enjoys her orderly ways and who regards the Ramona half of Ramona and Beezus, taken from the venerable Beverly Cleary children’s books, as more ...

Compared to so much American animation, which seems hell-bent on putting a global audience of addled kids in a paradoxical manic stupor, the work of Japan’s Studio Ghibli sets its own pace, establishes its own, meticulously observed realms of the fantastic and ...

The Mechanic is Arthur Bishop (Jason Statham), a crack assassin who can kill his targets without leaving a trace, and even — as we learn later — implicate third parties in the crime. Impressive. Except as we watch Bishop blunder his way through target after target, ...

I’ll be honest, in the spirit of the honestly shameless heartwarmer Dolphin Tale. I saw it in a somewhat distracted, agitated state...

If “director Baz Luhrmann” and “restraint” have ever appeared in the same sentence together, they were the word-bread creating a sandwich around the phrase “has absolutely no.” Considering that the gaudy Jay Gatsby is basically Luhrmann’s spirit animal, the union ...

Most modern comedies end up being so stupid that it’s painful to watch the actors embarrass themselves on the big screen. That’s why it’s a pleasure to see comic team Simon Pegg and Nick Frost skewer the alien conspiracy genre in the consistently funny Paul...

Recently, I joylessly trudged through the first season of Amazon’s Transparent, a show populated with so many soulless, vacuous, obnoxious characters that I began rooting for them to die horrifically. This follows my quasi-traumatic enduring of Breaking Bad, an over-...

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...