Rating: 2.5 stars
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...
Rating: 3.5 stars
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...
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-...
Rating: 2 stars
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...
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...
After 2007, which was quite simply the best year for movies in recent memory, 2008 almost had to be a letdown. It was, especially for me, since I didn’t jump on the WALL-E or the Rachel Getting...
Rating: 3.5 stars
It’s hard to convince people that Ron Howard’s Frost/Nixon, a fictionalized account the historic interview between British chat show host David Frost and disgraced American...
Rating: 3.5 stars
“I was born under unusual circumstances,” says our hero at the beginning of David Fincher’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. This massive understatement introduces us to...
Rating: 1 star
Seven Pounds is a riddle, wrapped in an enigma, cloaked in a really crappy movie.
How best to describe this clunker? Let’s put it this way: Seven Pounds isn’t just bad—it’s...
Rating: 2 stars
What will Jim Carrey be forced to do next? In Liar, Liar, he played a lawyer who, after being put under a spell, couldn’t tell a lie. In Yes Man, he plays an anti-social loan...
