A likable hagiography as nuanced as a plaque at the Cooperstown Hall of Fame, Brian Helgeland’s Jackie Robinson bio 42 finds a politic solution to the challenge Quentin Tarantino faced last year with Django Unchained: How to craft a crowd-pleasing multiplex period piece whose villain is, essentially, “all white people”?…

What must Bruce Willis have felt when he discovered that his seven or so minutes of G.I. Joe: Retaliation screen time offer much more agreeable Bruce Willis-ness than the entirety of A Good Day to Die Hard? Or that his cameo, shot two years ago and rich with quips and…

Like the blood that gushes forth from the elevators of the Overlook Hotel, brilliant/ridiculous theories of what Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining is really about have for years surged madly and memorably — especially online, where the internet’s dead-ends, blind links, and back-where-you-started arguments just might be another part of the…

Again and again, movies show you killing, but it’s one in a thousand on-screen killings that might get you to feel something of what killing is actually like. The same goes for fucking, but there, the numbers are worse: Whether it’s Hollywood’s quick-cut, nothing-below-the-waist bedroom montages or the mechanized chug…

Elisabeth Moss’ face is far from the only reason to savor Top of the Lake, Jane Campion’s smart, bracing, hugely enjoyable mystery rural noir Top of the Lake, which premieres on the Sundance Channel on Monday, March 18. But that pale-to-radiant instrument of hers—a mouth that suggests her characters might…

Steve Carell’s gift is for men who might drown in their own obliviousness. Like his Daily Show reporter or The Office’s Michael Scott, his 40-year-old virgin lived in terror that someone might catch on to the fact that he knows nothing about subjects he purports to have mastered. When his…

Twenty minutes into the first full-length movie based on L. Frank Baum’s most beloved novel, a duck pukes into the face of Larry Semon, the star and director. Semon’s 1925 flop, titled The Wizard of Oz, opens and closes with a Geppetto-esque toymaker reading to his granddaughter from a well-loved…

The murder of the children should be the most disturbing thing. But for many viewers, that isn’t the case in the four films chronicling the arrest, conviction, and 18-year incarceration of Damien Echols, Jessie Misskelley, and Jason Baldwin for a crime they didn’t commit. The crime-scene photos of three young…

Yet another cavalierly abstinent teen hero sulks through the swamps of Beautiful Creatures, a shot of pop-goth hogwash so overheated that during its run theater owners could set aside a couple of aisles and cultivate Louisiana passionflower. Here witch Lena (Alice Eng­lert) is urged by her family to spurn the…

Just a week or so after the Pentagon reversed its ban on allowing female soldiers into combat, here’s another breakthrough of a sort: The funniest scenes in the confused and shaggy comedy Identity Thief are of Melissa McCarthy and Jason Bateman beating the hell out of each other. McCarthy —…

Please, for his own good, somebody clap Dustin Hoffman into a chastity belt. Based on what Al Pacino suffers in Stand Up Guys and the identical humiliations visited up Robert De Niro in Little Fockers, it seems Hollywood will not be satisfied until it has speared a hypodermic into the…

Two sacred texts of the ’50s proto-counterculture have escaped the rapacious machine of cinema adaptation for a half-century. One is J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, which probably would have worked only if starring Salinger himself, and the other is Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, that ecstatic recount of crossings…

“Hyde Park On Hudson”: It’s Patriotic to Pleasure a President

Bill Murray as FDR Almost Enough to Save “Hyde Park on Hudson”

Sadly, country songwriters stand as nearly the only entertainers in our popular culture who craft memorable art on the subject of marriage, the state in which just less than half of Americans spend the majority of their lives. A few years ago, Brad Paisley, one of Nashville’s best, wrote and…

Perhaps you’ve lost faith in movies about amusingly digressive criminals. Maybe you believe it’s no longer possible to be pleasurably jolted by inventive swearing, from-no-place headshots, and posteverything structural flourishes. Certainly you have no reason to expect blood-splattered poetry or throat-clearing laughter from yet another movie in which Los Angeles…

The movie of choice this week for people who hold the beliefs that A) America is the strongest, best-est country that God ever virgin-birthed and B) that that nation somehow just isn’t strong enough to survive eight years of centrist Democratic leadership, Dinesh D’Souza’s 2016: Obama’s America actually does not…