The Runaways: Jett Trail
She can’t get away with it forever, but for now, Kristen Stewart can play the living crap out of these awkward, unpolished adolescent girls...
School Sucks for Wimpy Kid
The clunky family movie Diary of a Wimpy Kid shares its title with a successful series of novels by Jeff Kinney, though the plot...
The Ghost Writer: A Real Roman à Clef
We’ve had examples of prison literature throughout history, but The Ghost Writer may be the closest we’ve ever had to prison filmmaking. Roman Polanski...
Remember Me: An Affair to Forget
Oscar Wilde once wrote, “All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.” I’m not sure to what extent that applies to movies, but one reason...
Not the Finest Anything
As boilerplate as its title would suggest, Brooklyn’s Finest is no different from any other gritty New York City cop thriller made in the...
Oscar’s Hidden Gold
Hey, look! It’s an Oscar ceremony in March, just like we used to have every year. With all the attention on the Best Picture...
Tolstoy Finds The Last Station
When he died, Leo Tolstoy was basically an old hippie. Immensely rich and famous from authoring War and Peace and Anna Karenina, the Russian...
Butterscotch Isn’t Sweet
Bart van Bemmel talks quickly, and I'm not sure whether that's how he usually rolls or whether it's because he's eager to tell me...
Unhappy Haneke
When you watch slasher flicks and other movies that kill off innocent characters like ants, do you feel bad for those onscreen victims?
Do you...
North Carolina Burning
It all started with a casual remark. In 1970, Timothy Tyson was an 11-year-old white boy growing up in Oxford, N.C., when one of...
