Director Alexander Payne knows that it’s hard to find fulfillment in what Hollywood pejoratively refers to as the “flyover states” – that vast part of the country that stretches from eas...
While I would hardly call it cutting edge cinema, Ben Stiller’s The Secret Life of Walter Mitty is a rather risky proposition in this day and age. As the poet, philosopher and sports agent Jer...
Epic vision of The Hobbit hobbled by tepid paceDirector Peter Jackson returns to take care of unfinished business with his adaptation of The Hobbit, J.R.R. Tolkien’s prequel to the filmmaker&rsq...
Ghost Protocol pulls off the impossible Like Fast Five, Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol shows that not all action film franchises have to go quiet into that good night. Inventive, thrilling and sma...
Like most performers who are labeled as “comics,” Steve Coogan eventually grew tired of being pigeonholed and longed to prove that he could do more than make people laugh. He got the opportu...
While writing his follow-up to 2009’s Crazy Heart, director Scott Cooper had Christian Bale in mind for the lead role in what was to become Out of the Furnace. He even went so far as delaying...
While directors M. Night Shyamalan (Remember him? The Sixth Sense ring a bell?) and Spike Lee have both had to abandon their independent ways and have essentially become filmmakers for hire, at...
It’s never good when your mind starts wandering while watching a movie. To be sure, it is the rare film that keeps you in rapt attention from start to finish, but when you begin thinking about...
When Philomena Lee became pregnant as a teenager in Ireland in 1951, she had very few options. Out of shame, her parents sent her to a convent in Roscrea where she worked as an indentured laundry lady...
In 1989, after suffering an unusually long draught where successful animated features were concerned, Disney Studios released The Little Mermaid, a blockbuster musical cartoon based on a Hans Ch...