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Review: Rust And Bone

One image from Jacques Audiard's overwrought melodrama suggests what a shimmering, mysterious movie it might have been.

By: PETER KEOUGH | December 18, 2012

I'm at a loss to empathize with the middle-aged plight of Pete (Paul Rudd) and Debbie (Leslie Mann), supporting players in Judd Apatow's Knocked Up , now front and center in the writer/director/producer's kinda-sorta sequel.

By: BRETT MICHEL | December 20, 2012

Review: Hyde Park On Hudson

Lurking beneath Hyde Park on Hudson , the latest film to repurpose historical icons for Oscar-bait melodrama, is a screwball comedy trying desperately to break though.

By: JAKE MULLIGAN | December 13, 2012

Review: Playing For Keeps

Gabriele Muccino's misogynistic family sports film stars Gerard Butler as has-been Scottish footie star George Dryer, a man who once "got more ass than a toilet seat," according to screenwriter Robbie Fox, who bends it like Beckham to present George as the willing victim of oversexed soccer moms making advances toward their kids' new coach.

By: BRETT MICHEL | December 12, 2012

Review: The Central Park Five

Rough justice
It wasn't the Mississippi Delta but enlightened, liberal New York City where, in 1989, five Harlem and Bronx teenage boys, black and Latino, were arrested, bullied by the police, and intimidated into making false confessions that they had raped and brutally injured a female jogger in Central Park.

By: GERALD PEARY | December 13, 2012

Review: The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

Short subject
Some things were meant to be shorter, like Hobbits, and The Hobbit.

By: PETER KEOUGH | December 13, 2012

Review: The Comedy

Many in the audience rankled as Rick Alverson's The Comedy played in competition at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival.

By: GERALD PEARY | December 05, 2012

Review: Deadfall

To his credit, director Stefan Ruzowitzky seems to be attempting a critique of patriarchy, since all the men are assholes and the women are victims.

By: PETER KEOUGH | December 06, 2012

Review: Killing Them Softly

Though Andrew Dominik shot his follow-up to 2007's The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford in N'awlins, it's a Boston movie through-and-through.

By: BRETT MICHEL | December 05, 2012

Review: The Collection

Marcus Dunstan's second outing brings back Arkin (Josh Stewart), the only man to have escaped the masked figure's meat grinders.

By: BRETT MICHEL | December 05, 2012

Review: My Worst Nightmare

Dream casting
The storyline of Anne Fontaine's French comedy is mainstream: a yuppie art dealer, Agathe (Isabelle Huppert), finds her condescending values challenged and her sexuality opened up by a crude but "natural" laborer (Benoît Poelvoorde).

By: GERALD PEARY | December 03, 2012

Review: The Waiting Room

If people believe Mitt Romney's assertion that emergency rooms are a solution for the uninsured, this is a powerful rebuke.

By: BRETT MICHEL | November 27, 2012

Review: Mahler On The Couch

Couch potato
Mahler on the Couch , from the father-and-son directing team of Percy and Felix Adlon, offers some creative speculation, with flashbacks detailing the crisis points of the marriage and snatches from the anguished first movement of Mahler's unfinished Tenth Symphony.

By: JEFFREY GANTZ | November 27, 2012

Review: A Royal Affair

Chances are a movie about 18th-century Danish history might not be a grabber. But this one could have been, had director Nikolaj Arcel cut the length by about 15 minutes, injected some zest into the narrative, and perhaps done some recasting.

By: PETER KEOUGH | November 23, 2012

Review: Rise of the Guardians

A true surprise, this feature directing debut from storyboard artist Peter Ramsey isn't the lump of coal I expected. Instead it's a computer-animated crowd pleaser featuring unique interpretations of mythical childhood characters reinvented as the kiddie equivalent (well, kiddie-er) of The Avengers .

By: BRETT MICHEL | November 23, 2012

Review: The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 2

As vampire/teen heartthrob Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson) embraces his bride, Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart), for the first time since she died (and awoke as a new member of the bloodsucking Cullen clan) while giving birth to the rapidly aging Renesmee (Mackenzie Foy), he smiles and says, "We're the same temperature finally."

By: BRETT MICHEL | November 21, 2012

Review: Tristana

Papist plot
Though one was an atheist and the other a churchgoer, both Luis Buñuel and Alfred Hitchcock were obsessed with their Catholicism.

By: GERALD PEARY | November 21, 2012

Review: 2012 British Arrow Awards

These British imports come from varying corners of the marketplace, from phone companies to soft-drink makers, and seek to appeal to international jet setters, the child in all of us, or even to the daring bit of ourselves that would like to piss off Chef Gordon Ramsay.

By: MONICA CASTILLO | November 21, 2012