Over the past several months, the cast and crew of The X-Files: I Want to Believe considered it a badge of honor to be as tight-lipped about the plot of their film as possible. Internet searches met with futility. Spoiler sites were useless. The film’s trailers were little more than a jumble of unintelligible images. […]

[Read more →]

“When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child,” says St. Paul, “but when I became a man, I put away childish things.” Step Brothers is a movie about adults acting like children, by adults acting like children, for adults who like to act […]

[Read more →]

To call The Dark Knight the greatest superhero movie ever made is an understatement of titanic proportions. And yet, conversely, the film is so devoid of camp and superhero tropes, and is presented with such assured realism, that it hardly feels like a superhero movie at all. The most eagerly anticipated popcorn blockbuster of the […]

[Read more →]

When we lived in New York City, there were certain Broadway shows my wife had to drag me to. Often they were musicals. I simply wasn’t as interested in the musical extravaganzas as the more epic, “serious” plays. Ironically enough, it was usually the plays I had to be coerced into attending that I ended […]

[Read more →]

The first Hellboy was loads of fun, a movie about a comic book superhero as different from the tight wearing paradigms of virtue on the theater screens next door as you could get. Mexican director Guillermo del Toro, not yet a household name (though he was up and coming — he turned down a chance […]

[Read more →]

The Wackness faced an enormous hurdle straight out of the gate. How do you encourage an audience to identify with and even root for a main character who is an unrepentant drug dealer? Normally you take two hours to create a character arc, allowing your lead to change to such a degree that the person […]

[Read more →]

“Why shouldn’t a writer be a rock star?” someone asks in Gonzo: The Life & Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, the new documentary about the raging iconoclast whose writing and unhinged behavior drew as many fans as it repulsed. Few journalists have attained the notoriety of Hunter S. Thompson and few films have captured […]

[Read more →]

These days it seems that originality is something that Hollywood inadvertently misplaced and subsequently forgot about decades ago. With sequels and remakes elbowing each other to get onto theater screens, is it any wonder that Tinseltown looks like a Frankenstein’s monster, stitched together with the decaying body parts of far better films? If this describes […]

[Read more →]

We’ve had movies based on real life, novels, comic books, video games and even toys. But Kit Kittredge: An American Girl may be the first movie based on a doll. If that sounds like an empty-headed and unoriginal source for a motion picture, you’d no doubt be right. However, what director Patricia Rozema does with […]

[Read more →]

When Did You Last See Your Father? is autobiographical, based on a book by an author who shares a name with the film’s central character. The film tells us in the first few seconds that it is based on a true story. It is an odd admission for so interiorized a film. There are no […]

[Read more →]