What Maisie Knew updates to present day Henry James’ 1897 novel about a young girl used as an emotional pawn between her divorced parents. As directed by Scott McGehee and David Siegel (co-directors of The Deep End, Bee Season) from a screenplay by Nancy Doyne and Carroll Cartwright, the new film navigates with rich emotional [...]

The other day, after surviving a screening of Hangover III and faced with writing about a “comedy” so completely humorless that its relentless ineptitude felt like it had to be intentional, I had a moment of clarity about the film, the franchise, and its smug, hack auteur Todd Phillips (Old School, Hangover I and II, [...]

(Seriously – this is a really long, rambling, geek-wonky piece about why I’m disappointed in Star Trek Into Darkness. It’s really probably only of intersted to hard-core Trek fans who’ve seen Into Darkness and are thus spoiler-proof. And even they might get bored with it all.) In my previous piece about why I felt a [...]

“What do you think the Devil is going to look like if he’s around?… Nobody is going to be taken in by a guy with a long, red, pointy tail! What’s he gonna sound like?… “He will just bit by little bit lower our standards where they are important. Just a tiny little bit. Just [...]

It’s possible to both love the giddy, flamboyant excesses and musical abandon of Baz Luhrmann’s 2001 fever-dream Moulin Rouge and appreciate the rich prose and all-American soul-searching of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel The Great Gatsby and still come away from Luhrmann’s new film version of the literary classic feeling that just because someone can do [...]

I’d guess most everyone who helped give Iron Man Three the number two box-office opening of all time (after its stable mate The Avengers last year) came away from it feeling suitably entertained by the First Summer Film of the Year. But so much of that feeling, including the public’s attendance and “A” CinemaScore, can’t help [...]