POSTED // Jun 11,2007 - There’s a big fat moral to Good Night, and Good Luck, a bold-faced cautionary analogy about journalism, ethics and flag-wrapped zealotry, but that’s actually the worst reason to watch director George Clooney’s blissfully spare retelling...

POSTED // Jun 11,2007 - If you’re mentally ill, you must beware the hipster, for he wants to make you his mascot. If you’ve got a half-crippling neurosis or an insurmountable brain hurdle, yet you’re also cogent enough to create art without irony, the hipster...

POSTED // Jun 11,2007 - Nobody really smokes in Thank You for Smoking, director Jason Reitman’s ambitious satire of spin-doctoring and media manipulation centered on the cigarette industry and its apologists. Robert Duvall, playing an imperious, julep-swilling Old South...

POSTED // Jun 11,2007 - Somehow, you?ve always known it would come down to this: High school kids will have to save the world. It?ll be up to the youth, the shining future of America, to save our conformist hides from the monsters. It?s inevitable, in a way; it?s the end product...

POSTED // Jun 11,2007 - I’m thinking about making a movie about Denmark. Sure, I’m not Danish, I’ve never been to Denmark and I’ve never actually met any Danes except for a guy who once gave me directions to Arsenal’s soccer stadium in London and...

POSTED // Jun 11,2007 - So many recent movies with Sundance heritage'either actual or just ideological'are basically a performance in search of a story. First-time writer-directors seem to have a particular bent for building overwrought dramas, heist capers or the old reliable...

POSTED // Jun 11,2007 - Whether it’s movies about moviemaking, plays about playwrights or rap singles about how tough it is to be a rap star, entertainment about entertainment has always made my head ache. I just can’t stand the blithe assumption that an artist’s...

POSTED // Jun 11,2007 - People have been trying to make the next Hoosiers for two decades now, but not everybody can figure out why that 1986 paean to small-town virtues, inflexible coaching and the purest jump shot in basketball history is still more fun than almost any sports...

POSTED // Jun 11,2007 - There are certain areas, figures and epochs in human history that are just about tapped, cinematically speaking. I’m not talking about romantic comedies or heist pictures, which hopefully will be made in perpetuity, but several specific subgenres...

POSTED // Jun 11,2007 - Woody Allen fans are like evangelicals eagerly awaiting the Second Coming'only their god is still technically here. A full half-dozen times since 1998, we’ve been told Allen’s newest film is his return to relevance after an epic decline. Woody...