POSTED // Apr 12,2013 - With the constant drone of the 2012 campaign season still ringing in our ears, it’s hard to imagine building a heroic narrative out of political advertising.

POSTED // Apr 5,2013 - In June 1993, I stood in line at a Northern California multiplex with my then-roommates, awaiting our showtime for Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park. One of them in particular had been giddy for weeks leading up

POSTED // Mar 29,2013 - If I were to distill my gut reaction as the final credits began to roll on my first viewing of Abbas Kiarostami’s Like Someone in Love, it would look something like this: “Wha?”

POSTED // Mar 22,2013 - Provocateur: It’s such a loaded, even lazy term. Sure, it might seem to apply to Spring Breakers writer/director Harmony Korine as much as it would to any filmmaker.

POSTED // Mar 22,2013 - Sure, I’m a critic—but I’m also an American, and I don’t like seeing our institutions in peril. Which is why Olympus Has Fallen had me muttering angrily to myself: “Why couldn’t this have been the latest Die Hard movie?”

POSTED // Mar 15,2013 - Funny—like former Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s legendary line about pornography—is an “I know it when I see it” proposition. Often, nothing will kill a joke faster than trying to analyze it.

POSTED // Mar 15,2013 - With the arrival of 56 Up, I think it’s fair to ask: Has Michael Apted’s now-legendary documentary series become more theoretically fascinating than actually fascinating?

POSTED // Mar 8,2013 - Let’s not put too fine a point on it: Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky saved Damien Echols’ life. That wasn’t their intent when they started making a documentary that came to be called Paradise Lost,

POSTED // Mar 8,2013 - So, it turns out in Oz the Great & Powerful that the man behind the curtain is even smaller and less mighty than Dorothy had discovered in the Emerald City.

POSTED // Mar 1,2013 - As soon as the closing credits for Jack the Giant Slayer began to roll, I knew I was in dangerous territory. Once again, I was about to enter the “lighten up” zone.