POSTED // Feb 26,2009 - Animation! It’s not just for kiddie movies anymore. Actually, that’s been true at least since Ralph Bakshi’s 1972 X-rated Fritz the Cat, if not the intricately smart Looney Tunes shorts of the 1940s. But the financial success of the Disney juggernaut—followed by the Mouse’s inevitable imitators—has cemented the idea that if it’s a cartoon, it must be for the kids.

POSTED // Feb 9,2009 -

POSTED // Feb 9,2009 - Sixteen episodes of Alex O’Loughlin’s sexy Los Angeles vampire trying to woo mortal Internet journalist Sophia Myles (who was more than willing), and then it was over—and we’re lucky it lasted that.

POSTED // Feb 3,2009 - Have you ever seen the 1931 Dracula, with Béla Lugosi as the Transylvanian bloodsucker? Holy Satan in Hades, is it sexy. This was before Hollywood’s Hays Code—the precursor to the MPAA’s rating system, which was implemented in 1930 but wasn’t enforced with any gusto until 1934—effectively de-fanged movies, and Lugosi’s vampire is handsome, elegant, debona...

POSTED // Jan 21,2009 -

POSTED // Jan 14,2009 - That Defiance is not relentlessly grim—even as it’s, you know, still fairly grim—is a credit to director Edward Zwick, whose track record on intense storytelling ranges from the starkly brutal (the 1983 TV movie Special Bulletin, about a nuclear terrorist attack on American soil) to the laughably off-key (2003’s The Last Samurai). Here, though—in the tale of three rog...

POSTED // Dec 24,2008 - Surely the obscene desperation so many put into the necessity of having a date—or at least exciting plans—for New Year’s Eve is some sort of cognitive dissonance connected to the emperor’s-new-clothes fear of being the one to come out and say it: It’s the most overrated night of the year. nSo sure, if you want to laugh at all the suckers who get depressed just because...

POSTED // Nov 19,2008 - nI’ll be real clever, I thought. I’ll look back at the long history of cinematic spies and find a correlation between geopolitics and how seriously we want our spy flicks. Witness the present: With the United States seemingly hopelessly quagmired in Iraq and Afghanistan, Hollywood—in partnership with the Brits, pretty much our only friends left in the “coalition of the will...

POSTED // Oct 22,2008 - Some documentaries change how you see the world. Some change how you see yourself. Trouble the Water—Grand Jury winner for Best Documentary at Sundance in 2008—astonishingly, does both, and does both better the more you suspect yourself in no need of any eye-opening. nIf you consider yourself an enlightened, civilized person, as I consider myself to be, then you have no need to have it...

POSTED // Oct 1,2008 - If the last seven-plus years of life in America have been, ahem, something of an ongoing challenge to the ideals of the U.S. Constitution, well, we’ll have our chance soon enough to have a say in how the next four-to-eight years will go when we...