RATING:
There is so much that is great about the French film I’ve Loved You So Long, I’m willing to overlook its flaws.
As the film begins, Lea (Elsa Zylberstein) is picking up her older sister Juliette (Kirsten Scott Thomas) from the airport. But there’s something stilted and tense about this reunion. Eventually, we find out [...]

Oscar nominations are tomorrow. Here are my predictions. (Go Kate Winslet!)
BEST PICTURE
*The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
*The Dark Knight
*Frost/Nixon
*Milk
*Slumdog Millionaire
DIRECTING
*Danny Boyle – Slumdog Millionaire
*David Fincher – The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
*Ron Howard – Frost/Nixon
*Christopher Nolan – The Dark Knight
*Gus Van Sant – Milk
ACTOR IN A LEADING ROLE
*Clint Eastwood – Gran Torino
*Frank Langella – [...]

RATING:
Paul Blart: Mall Cop would’ve made a nice digital short. The story of an out-of-shape, over zealous mall cop (Kevin James) who takes down a band of criminals, Die-Hard-style has a few laughs. It’s funny when Blart runs after the bad guys and falls over for no apparent reason. It’s funny when he [...]

RATING:
The rapper Christopher Wallace (a.k.a. Notorious B.I.G., a.k.a. Biggie Smalls) was an unlikely superstar. He was overweight, not particularly good-looking, and had been a smalltime crack peddler on the mean streets of Brooklyn. But he was an expert wordsmith with an unbelievable flow, a ribald sense of humor, a storyteller’s eye for detail, and [...]

RATING:
Professional boxing has inspired many great movies. Pro wrestling? Not so much. Until now.
As The Wrestler opens to the strains of blaring ’80s heavy metal, we get a brief overview of the career of Randy “The Ram” Robinson (Mickey Rourke). He was a pumped up pretty boy with flowing bleached blond locks, a [...]

Historians will look back and say that 2008 was the year of the meta performance, the year that movies—and moviegoers—finally became so sophisticated that each film became an endless loop of self-commentary.
Let’s start with Tom Cruise in Tropic Thunder. Would that performance have been nearly as funny (assuming you thought it was funny to begin [...]

RATING:
He lost me with the growl. In Gran Torino, Clint Eastwood plays Walt Kowalski, a recent widower and Korean War Vet who is pissed at the world.  He’s pissed that his neighbors are all Asians and Latinos—“gooks” and “wetbacks” he calls them. He’s pissed that no one buys American anymore. (He worked at the [...]

Here’s the kind of useless exercise that only a true film dork with way too much free time on her hands could accomplish: I’ve listed all 36 of Woody Allen’s theatrical films (okay, there are actually 38, but I’ve never seen Cassandra’s Dream or Love and Death) and ranked them from best to worst.
I [...]