Did you ever wonder what Annie Hall might be like if the main protagonist was Annie and not Alvy Singer?

You have your answer, in a way, in Noah Baumbach’s Frances Ha. And I have a bit of bad news for you: The film would be a lot less delightful.

If you don’t know, Greta Gerwig, who plays the titular character, is truly the Diane Keaton to Baumbach’s Allen. (They are even apparently dating in real life.) He loves her—his camera loves her. He’s completely besotted with her fumbling, awkward, faux-näif adorableness. It was Baumbach who first introduced the mainstream to Gerwig, previously a darling of the mumblecore movement, in his Greenberg. I liked her in that movie, even considered her a star in the making. Since then, I’ve grown less enamored.

It’s not that I don’t think she has a certain charm—or a certain natural ability as an actress—it’s just that I find the whole “look at this adorable, broken fawn of a girl, always adorably blurting out the wrong thing and being adorably clumsy yet paradoxically, bewitchingly graceful” thing a bit tiresome.

Now if you do find Gerwig as bewitching as Baumbach does (and many do), Frances Ha will be the film...

It’s best to think of Now You See Me as a superhero movie, except instead of fighting with superhuman strength and speed, the heroes use their superhuman brains and wits.

They’re all magicians, and they’ve been recruited by a mysterious figure to join forces to gain, well. . .the film is never completely clear on that, but it has to do with achieving total clarity or somethin’. (So they’ve got that.)

I absolutely loved the opening of the film, as we meet each of the magicians: Cocky David Blaine-esque J. Daniel Atlas (Jesse Eisenberg, doing a variation of his Mark Zuckerberg, only with emo hair); crafty mentalist Merritt McKinney (Woody Harrelson); Atlas’s assistant-turned-sexy-headliner Henley Reeves (Isla Fisher); and an Artful Dodger-style street magician named Jack Wilder (Dave Franco).

In those opening scenes, at least, their magic seems credible, grounded in some sort of semi-believable reality.

But once they join forces—nicknaming themselves The Four Horseman—their tricks become increasingly over-the-top and incredible. They immediately perform an astonishing trick where they “teleport” a man to France and have him rob his own bank. Then, they give the money to the...

So, sigh. . . Is there anything more annoying than a glowing review of a film you can’t see? I know, I know. . . But I saw this film at the Maryland Film Festival this weekend and fell in love with it and just needed to write about it. If there’s any justice, it’ll be coming soon to an independent cinema house near you (hint-hint, film distribution companies).

The noted philosopher Britney Spears once famously sang that she was “not a girl, not yet a woman” and that paradox perfectly describes the status of Lila (Gina Piersanti), a 14 year old spending a long, listless summer on the beaches of Brooklyn.

Her best friend Chiara (Giovanna Salimeri) may only be a year older but she’s miles ahead in terms of her own sexual development. A dancer, Chiara has a knowledge of her body and its seductive powers. She’s already slept with boys and nonchalantly mentions that her new boyfriend, Patrick (Jesse Cordasco), needs practice in the oral sex department.

“I hate when they need practice,” Lila says, tentatively.

Lila’s own burgeoning sexuality has put her in a kind of fugue state—everywhere there is flesh, skin, and heat, and first time director Eliza Hittman...

Hey film fans! The Maryland Film Festival starts tonight! This is the last film I’ll be sneak previewing. It’s sort of great.

Before Facebook and Twitter—hell, before MySpace and Friendster—there was Napster, the music file sharing company that revolutionized, democratized, and completely freaked out the music industry.

Downloaded, the documentary on Napster, directed by Alex Winter (yes, that Alex Winter, from Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure), is about the rise and fall of this audacious start-up. But it’s also about the seismic generational divide between those who grew up expecting free things from the Internet and those who didn’t.

Napster started, as revolutions often do, in the mind of a young person—in this case, teenager Sean Fanning, a coder and music lover who wanted to find a more efficient way to share music with his friends. He developed the code for Napster and watched it take off like wildfire. First a few hundred people using it, then thousands, then millions.

He eventually joined forces with Sean Parker (later to be played by Justin Timberlake in The Social Network), an...