Joyous Shoot Me an Inspired Comedic Biography I’m not sure it’s possible to dislike Elaine Stritch. The Tony and Emmy Award winning comedian, now in her 80s, is as vital and as confident as ever, her joie de vivre and zest for living life as apparent now as it has ever been at any point […]

Pompeii is better than it has any right to be, especially considering the director’s track record, but that just makes its descent into lunacy, madness and melodramatic excess all the more off-putting, the movie sadly nothing more than a volcanic disappointment that lays waste to almost all of its more laudable and celebratory properties.

This movie is a titanic achievement that I’m still mulling over, so many pieces of it speaking with such unabashed eloquence calling the finished film an instant classic is almost a no-brainer.

Head-Scratching Winter’s Tale an Unforgivable Disaster Wow. Double-wow. Wow with cream and sugar and as many other syrupy, saccharine and calorie-filled toppings that I can think of slathered shamelessly on top. Honestly? I don’t know what to say. Winter’s Tale, as handsomely mounted as it is, as wonderfully acted as it might be (save an […]

About Last Night is superior to the 1986 version, and while not every facet of it is fresh or revealing, that doesn’t make the remake any less entertaining.

Understated, profound, moving and beautiful, Trueba’s latest is a divine examination of the creation process set amidst unimaginable strife and turmoil. In all the ways that matter most, The Artist and the Model is the director’s best film yet.

Reimagined RoboCop Back Laying Down the Law There’s no doubt that a big budget remake of director Paul Verhoeven’s 1987 satirical, hyper-violent 1987 sci-fi classic RoboCop always felt like a bad idea. There was no way a Hollywood studio, in this case Sony Pictures and MGM, would allow any of the deep, dark, unsentimentally brutal […]

Imagination Runs Wild in Idiosyncratic LEGO Movie I can’t say I was looking forward to The LEGO Movie. Much like Transformers or G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra (or their sequels), the whole idea seemed like nothing more than an extended commercial solely engineered to sell millions of dollars in toys and nothing else. As […]

Clooney’s Monuments Men a Well-Intentioned Disappointment George Clooney’s latest directorial effort The Monuments Men is both too much and too little both at the exact same time. The film is an episodic endeavor attempting to tell a story much larger and more fragmented than its 118 minute running time allows to be easily processed. At […]