RATING:
New Moon really is like porn for tweens. It has two dreamy boys—one athletic and smiley; the other brooding and poetic—both deeply, madly, eternally in love with the same girl. It features lots of moony stares and desperate embraces—and the fact that the athletic boy is [...]

RATING:
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Precious is that it isn't the most depressing film of the year.
It tells the story of 16-year-old Clareece "Precious" Jones (Gabourey Sidibe), who lives with her defiantly unemployed mother Mary (Mo'Nique) in a Harlem apartment. As the film begins, Precious [...]

RATING:
I experienced a bit of cognitive dissonance when they showed the real Michael Oher at the end of The Blind Side.
No, not because the young actor Quinton Aaron doesn't look much like the Ravens rookie offensive tackle—although he doesn't. But because the real Michael Oher walked [...]

RATING:
I think the thing I like most about Jenny (Carey Mulligan), the restless heroine of An Education, is how representative she is of a certain type of brainy teenager. Jenny, who lives in suburban London with her parents (Alfred Molina and Cara Seymour), thinks she's worldly [...]

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RATING:
2012 is like a 1970s disaster film on steroids. Instead of a towering inferno or a sinking cruiseliner, we have the whole planet Earth getting destroyed. Because that, ladies and gentleman, is how Roland Emmerich rolls.
2012 is a lot like Emmerich’s other apocalyptically-inclined gems—Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow—except the special effects are [...]

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RATING:
Robert Zemeckis’ 3-D animated Disney's A Christmas Carol is clearly a labor of love and, like so many labors of love, it feels slightly ill-advised.
Yes, the motion-capture animation is gorgeous—saturated, detailed, almost hyper real. But Zemeckis seems strangely intent on showing us just how real it can be.
In one of the opening scenes, an [...]

RATING:
When I saw the trailer for The Men Who Stare at Goats, I got pretty excited. A military satire based on a true(ish) story about a secret branch of the army that tried to develop human super powers, staring Jeff Bridges as its baked commander and George Clooney as a wild-eyed true believer? Count [...]

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RATING:
After seeing Amelia, you can only assume one of two things: That Amelia Earhart herself was an insipid, uninspiring woman or that filmmaker Mira Nair just blew it.
I think we can all draw the same conclusion.
How did this film go so far afoul? You have a talented director (I loved Nair’s The Namesake), a [...]

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RATING:
The trials of Job in 1950s Midwestern Jewish suburbia. That might be the best way to describe the dark comedy A Serious Man, which many are saying is the Coen brothers most personal film to date.
What, then, to make of the film’s protagonist, Larry Gopnik, played by New York theater vet Michael Stuhlbarg, and [...]

RATING:
It just makes sense that Spike Jonze, whose imagination is seemingly limitless and who always manages to bring a sense of off-kilter joy to his films, would be the perfect director to adapt Maurice Sendak’s beloved children's book, Where the Wild Things Are.
In the opening scenes, we meet Max (iconically adorable Max Records), a [...]