Michel Hazanavicius’s The Artist (2011) has so far reached a $25 million return compared to about three times that amount by The Descendants. (1) Alexander Payne’s The Descendants (2011) won... Read more

In the opening, he’s driving. It’s all enigma: his name, his expression, his past, his destination, his life. At the film’s close, he’s driving. And he’s wounde... Read more

 The Allegory of Fear & Will Unfolded “Facing fear and not concoctions of fear serving the needs of our own resident guardians of wealth and power is a far different enterprise th... Read more

Tim Burton’s movies mean what he wants them to mean. The devil in that sentence is that Tim Burton is not fond of meaning, or, to put it in an Alice-way, he sometimes believes in... Read more

Westerns are out of favour, supposedly because the international market isn’t interested in films of the American West but you don’t have to go transatlantic to find Millennials who have lit... Read more

Permission to write about The American (Anton Corbijn, 2010) as a portrayal of the future of the U.S. comes from the title. Justification comes from a correspondence between the film, specif... Read more

“I create my own reality,” she says when he says something about something being real and having to be faced. She’s a new character on a TV show called Mercy; she’s t... Read more

I doubt that President Obama will adopt the line “Ruin is a gift. Ruin is the road to transformation” as he and his party head toward the November Congressional elections. But Julia Roberts’... Read more

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Nick Schager, in a review of Crazy Heart which registers the magnetic charm of the Jeff Bridges’s character, calls Bad Blake, Bridges’s character, “a jalopy of a man,” a “dilapidated has-bee... Read more