There are a million reasons (about $100 million budgetary ones, to be exact) that I should hate Ben Stiller’s new adaptation of James Thurber’s The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, written by Steve Conrad and directed by and starring Stiller. For this latest update (following the 1947 Danny Kaye version), Walter Mitty (Stiller) is now [...]

Well, it’s better–at least more entertaining–than last winter’s first Hobbit film. So there’s that. But, like Gandalf and his fellow wizards and elf lords catching vague feelings of growing darkness in the wind, for us long-time Tolkien fans (and us fans of Peter Jackson’s decade-old Lord of the Rings film trilogy) there’s a creeping sense [...]

There are times—and they come at me more frequently these days—when I feel out of step with everything and everyone. Don’t worry, I’m not going to go into full sobbing mental breakdown right here in the first paragraph—I’ll save that for later. But when I see the movie-going public go ga-ga for a dull, corporate [...]