Film
Film Shorts
KRISTIAN LINOPENING: The Paperboy (R) Lee Daniels (Precious) adapts Pete Dexter’s novel about an investigative reporter (Matthew McConaughey) returning to his Florida hometown to find the truth about a decades-old murder. Also with Nicol...
Argo, Psychopaths: Let’s Fake a Movie!
Would-be filmmakers are the driving characters in these thrillers.KRISTIAN LIN
By coincidence, the titles of both movies this week refer to movies within the movies. Neither Argo nor Seven Psychopaths is really about the filmmaking process — the first throws up a nonexistent movie as a smokescreen for a...
Film Shorts
KRISTIAN LINOPENING: Butter (R) Jennifer Garner stars in this political satire as an Iowa woman who expects to finally win her local butter-sculpting competition, only to see her supremacy challenged by a little girl (Yara Shahidi) with pr...
Frankenweenie: Ghost Dog
Tim Burton gives himself a jolt with this animated film.KRISTIAN LIN
Expanded from the same 1984 short film that got Tim Burton fired as a Disney animator, Frankenweenie (which Burton has made under Disney’s auspices, ironically enough) comes on the heels of the terrific ParaNorman and the sur...
Wallflower: End of the Tunnel
A beloved teen novel’s author turns it into a great teen movie.KRISTIAN LIN
Stephen Chbosky’s coming-of-age novelette The Perks of Being a Wallflower was a huge hit when it was published in 1999, and the author received numerous offers to turn the book into a film. However, Chbosky held out because h...
Super Looper
This sci-fi thriller will wow you, then go back in time and wow you again.KRISTIAN LIN
You can’t accuse Rian Johnson of lacking ambition. Best known for his polarizing debut film, the 2006 high-school noir picture Brick, Johnson has come up rapidly through low-budget indie cinema. His third film, Looper, is his...
Film Shorts
KRISTIAN LINOPENING: The Perks of Being a Wallflower (PG-13) Stephen Chbosky adapts his own best-selling novel about a Pittsburgh kid (Logan Lerman) who navigates through his freshman year of high school after a stay in a mental hospital. ...
Pitch Perfect: College Notes
It’s the Bring It On of a cappella singing competitions!KRISTIAN LIN
Between Glee, YouTube, and TV’s various singing competition shows, our pop culture is awash in cover songs like never before. That’s why the spectacle of a bunch of mostly white college girls covering Blackstreet’s “No ...
Film Shorts
KRISTIAN LINOPENING: Compliance (R) This film by Craig Zobel (Great World of Sound) is about a mysterious prank caller who induces a fast-food outlet manager (Ann Dowd) to inflict a series of humiliations on her employee (Dreama Walker). A...
End of Watch: Partners Against Crime
Old-school good acting redeems this new-jack buddy cop thriller.KRISTIAN LIN
End of Watch is the third in a string of look-at-me-I’m-so-gritty dramas about Los Angeles cops directed by David Ayer. This one is different, partly because it’s shot in a found-footage style but mostly because it’s actu...