POSTED // Mar 22,2012 - Here’s what’s extraordinary about Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games: not much, really. Don’t misunderstand; it’s a solid, satisfying read, no crime against literature,

POSTED // Mar 16,2012 - Seriously, what the hell happened to Robert De Niro? Remember when he was the male counterpart to Meryl Streep—Greatest Living American Actor, incapable of giving a bad performance, a reliable indicator

POSTED // Mar 16,2012 - It’s all well and good that, early in 21 Jump Street, a police chief (Nick Offerman) informs rookie cops Jenko (Channing Tatum) and Schmidt (Jonah Hill) that they’re reviving

POSTED // Mar 9,2012 - If you’ve spent any amount of time as a professional film critic, you get used to a few common rejoinders. We all know exactly what unhappy readers think about our thwarted real career goals, an

POSTED // Mar 9,2012 - Maybe character studies of line-blurring cops are nothing new in popular culture; we’ve had our share of Bad Lieutenants and The Shields.

POSTED // Mar 2,2012 - “There’s more to this story than what’s on the page,” announces the titular character in Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax (Danny DeVito) during the film’s proscenium prologue—and you can almost hear the desperation in his voice.

POSTED // Feb 24,2012 - Kingdoms will fall and seas will boil before a significant portion of the American movie-going audience goes to see a subtitled Iranian film like Asghar Farhadi’s Oscar-nominated A Separation.

POSTED // Feb 24,2012 - Plenty of movies let you know fairly quickly that they’re going to be excruciating. Far rarer is something that starts out excruciating, then becomes utterly fascinating.

POSTED // Feb 17,2012 - It has taken decades of watching and writing about movies, but This Means War might have finally helped me articulate what feels like a fundamental rule about would-be escapist entertainment:

POSTED // Feb 17,2012 - If your impression of animated features has been shaped entirely by the whiz-bang studio product of the CGI era, bring an open mind to The Secret World of Arrietty. That’s not the way Japan’s Studio Ghibli rolls.