POSTED // Jan 4,2013 - Yes: There are fair reasons to be frustrated with The Impossible, director Juan Antonio Bayona’s fact-based account of a European family trying to survive the devastating tsunami that hit Southeast Asia

POSTED // Dec 28,2012 - Somewhere along the line, the number 10 landed itself a really great publicist, with lists of the best and worst of anything locked into groupings that should make us pity that poor 11th-best anything.

POSTED // Dec 21,2012 - Les Misérables misses the power of its source material.By Scott Renshawscottr@cityweekly.netMaybe it’s not necessary for me to lay out my Les Misérables bona fides. Maybe it doesn&

POSTED // Dec 21,2012 - I have a dream that, one of these days, Judd Apatow (The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up) is going to make a 100-minute comedy so tightly packed with great material that you’re not going to be able to breathe

POSTED // Dec 14,2012 - “All good stories deserve embellishment,” says the wizard Gandalf (Ian McKellen) to Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman) in The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey.

POSTED // Dec 14,2012 - Some bad movies feel like the result of unfulfilled potential, something that was close to working if this or that had fallen just slightly a different way.

POSTED // Dec 7,2012 - On a certain level, I suppose you can’t blame an annoying thing for being what it is. There’s no point in getting righteously indignant about a mosquito sucking the very life out of you

POSTED // Nov 30,2012 - Literary historical costume dramas: They’re all over theaters, especially during the awards-baiting fall and winter months. They fill their casts with great actors, place them in meticulously decorated rooms

POSTED // Nov 30,2012 - Writer/director Andrew Dominik’s heist thriller Killing Me Softly is set in 2008, during the height of the panic over the U.S. financial collapse and the run-up to Barack Obama’s election.

POSTED // Nov 21,2012 - Matthew Quick’s terrific 2008 novel The Silver Linings Playbook was a jaggedly funny, often unsettling first-person story of a man trying to return to normalcy after a traumatic event leads to a psychological breakdown