Monthly Archives: January 2013

It’s funny how the beloved movies of one’s less politically-correct adolescent past turn out to have a lot more edge to them once you show them to your own kids. “Back to the Future” has more sexuality than you remember, … Continue reading →

Julie and Jason are a couple contemplating “cheating.” OK, they aren’t really a couple. They’re New York neighbors, best friends since college. So the cheating isn’t what you think either. Julie (Jennifer Westerfeldt) and Jason (Adam Scott) are both in … Continue reading →

It had been 18 years since Martin Landau worked for Tim Burton. But when the director who gave Landau his Oscar-winning role (in “Ed Wood”) wrote him with another offer, Landau didn’t hesitate. “He sent me a letter, a little … Continue reading →

“Frankenweenie” is darned near an instant classic. Tim Burton has taken the animated short that launched his career and expanded it into a vivid and moving essay on science and love — the love a budding middle school scientist, Victor … Continue reading →

“For a Good Time, Call…” is a romantic comedy masquerading as a sex farce — a bad BAD girl sex farce, full of naughty talk and boys calling girls to hear that filthy language over the phone. And if that’s … Continue reading →

The Rape of Nanking, the 1937 rape and murder rampage by Japanese troops, comes so vividly to life in “The Flowers of War” that you wish the great Chinese director Zhang Yimou had a better movie to put in front … Continue reading →

The family-friendliest movie comedy this holiday season is also the sappiest and schmaltziest.   And thanks to Billy Crystal, the shtickiest.

Growing up in Germany, actress Diane Kruger learned the same things about Marie Antoinette that most people did — that she was hated, that the French called her “The Ice Queen,” that when told the French peasants couldn’t afford the … Continue reading →

Marie Antoinette earns a big-screen makeover in “Farewell, My Queen,” a lavish French period piece based an inspired fictional fancy based on real history.

Scholarship, my favorite grad school professor preached, is “like building a wall. You do it brick by brick.” In “Footnote,” Eliezer Shkolnik has spent his entire life with those bricks. You’d think this Talmudic philologist would have a wall all … Continue reading →