One of the year's most critically shellacked movies (the pros were forced to watch it in theaters on Christmas Day alongside the common hordes), Holmes & Watson begins as ineptly as any …
Slipped into theaters with few advance screenings or the usual ballyhoo for a Clint Eastwood film (this one featuring what might be the 88-year-old's last leading performance), The Mule turn…
For more than two decades, Nicole Holofcener has made wonderfully level-headed comedies that center on the loop-de-loops of the middle- and upper-middle-class female psyche " the contradicto…
Bashing Neil Simon has been almost de rigueur for highbrow critics since the playwright had his first hits in the early sixties. But now that he's 82 [Editor's note: this story was originall…
For decades, filmmakers have turned to Al Pacino when they've wanted a galvanic leading man " a declaimer, a pop-top. But as the title character in the HBO movie Paterno, the actor barely sp…
This was the best, most inspiring, and most sheerly likable Academy Awards telecast I've ever seen and I've seen 'em all. (Well, all since 1967, when I was seven years old.) It was also " in…
Although Rupert Everett's Oscar Wilde biopic The Happy Prince has a downward trajectory that left the audience at its Sundance premiere more muted than was warranted, it's lifted into the st…
Although Sony Pictures has advertised the hell out of Flatliners, it didn't screen the movie for critics or even put it in theaters for the now-common Thursday night showings. The studio mus…
Aaron Sorkin makes his feature-film directorial debut with Molly's Game, based on the autobiography of a crazy-high-stakes poker impresario named Molly Bloom. Don't expect lengthy, searching…
In 1983, Bette Gordon directed the chill, tantalizingly unresolved Variety, in which a young woman goes to work in the ticket booth of a hard-core porn theater and begins to see herself thro…
Mike Birbiglia's second feature, Don't Think Twice, is a bleak ensemble drama that charts the dissolution of a warm improv-comedy ensemble. It's funny and inspiring and harsh and depressing.…
Nicholas Hytner's twee film of Alan Bennett's The Lady in the Van is the final injury to what was, in its original form, a perfect thing: Bennett's diary entries recounting the appearance of…
Early in the film of the fairy-tale operetta Into the Woods, I was nearly jumping out of my seat with glee. The creators of the original show, Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine, had intended…
Kevin Kline is almost too good a fit for the aging Errol Flynn in the story of Flynn's final affair " with a 15-year-old girl " in The Last of Robin Hood. Kline became a star onstage as the …
Twenty years ago, André Gregory gathered a group of great actors to rehearse Uncle Vanya; Louis Malle came in to film their work, almost as if he were shooting a documentary; and the re…
It's not hard to guess why Roman Polanski was moved to make a film of David Ives's brilliantly silly play Venus in Fur. The tale of an arrogant male writer-director who's increasingly …
The tasteless bombardment that is Les Misérables would, under most circumstances, send audiences screaming from the theater, but the film is going to be a monster hit and award winner, and …