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

POSTED // Nov 21,2012 - It’s going to be fascinating to watch what part of Life of Pi might wind up irritating viewers most: its decidedly Unitarian-Universalist religious leanings,

POSTED // Nov 16,2012 - “Compromise … or you risk it all,” the president of the United States warns an ideologically rigid member of his own party—and no, you haven’t just walked into a Campaign 2012 reality show.

POSTED // Nov 9,2012 - It’s hard not to walk away from the thrilling Skyfall with the impression that the James Bond franchise is feeling just a touch … defensive.

POSTED // Nov 9,2012 - Yes, there are mist-covered moors and tragic romantic entanglements. But in other fairly significant ways, this isn’t the Wuthering Heights you may think you know.