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  Men in Black goes back in time, but you still get to pay the 2012 price

  By Nick Pinkerton

  Can any one of the millions of Americans who saw Men in Black 2 in 2002 describe its plot today? A single scene? I saw both MIB movies upon their... More >>

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  Brit Marling preaches end times in Sound of My Voice

  By Karina Longworth

  Twentysomething Silver Lake couple Peter (Christopher Denham) and Lorna (Nicole Vicius) talk their way into an unnamed cult that meets in the... More >>

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  Becoming a real person in Goodbye First Love

  By Karina Longworth

  Writer-director Mia Hansen-Løve's third feature, Goodbye First Love begins in 1999, when protagonist Camille (Lola Créton), a... More >>

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  More culture-clash yuks than comedy revolution in Sacha Baron Cohen's The Dictator

  By Karina Longworth

  In his third collaboration with director Larry Charles, Sacha Baron Cohen plays Admiral General Aladeen, the young, dumb dictator of fictional... More >>

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  Deep in the heart of Texas with Richard Linklater's Bernie

  By Nick Pinkerton

  Richard Linklater's Bernie is the rarest of rarities: a truly unexpected film. It might be classified as a black comedy, for it deals with the... More >>

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  The narrow worldview of What to Expect When You're Expecting

  By Eric Hynes

  Even though it doesn't have a story, characters or setting, Heidi Murkoff's mega-bestselling, 28-year-old pregnancy manual, What to Expect When... More >>

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  Battleship: Because every generation needs an Armageddon

  By Nick Pinkerton

  Every once in a while, a movie comes along that's so utterly shameless that it achieves a certain grandeur. Peter Berg's Battleship, which I... More >>

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  Johnny Depp plays a vampire family-man in Tim Burton's Dark Shadows

  By Nick Pinkerton

  A significant portion of Tim Burton's output over the past decade has been concerned with slipping the "Burton treatment" to susceptible texts:... More >>

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  A toothless satire of the Catholic Church in We Have a Pope

  By Melissa Anderson

  Suitable entertainment for a Knights of Columbus fundraiser, Nanni Moretti's Good Friday–released We Have a Pope finds the Most Holy... More >>

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  With his first movie in fourteen years, Whit Stillman returns, triumphant and worried

  By Karina Longworth

  Whit Stillman made a name for himself making semiautobiographical, deadpan, highly literate comedies about the night lives of idle heirs (his... More >>

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  Whit Stillman returns with the toe-tapping college-girl fantasy Damsels in Distress

  By Eric Hynes

  Back with his first film in fourteen years, Whit Stillman still operates in a world of his own. With Damsels in Distress, Stillman's follow-up to... More >>

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  Superheroes bump superegos in Joss Whedon's all-star Avengers. Things go boom.

  By Karina Longworth

  At the start of Joss Whedon's long-awaited Marvel superhero supergroup flick, The Avengers, the Tesseract — a powerful, potentially... More >>

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  A couple struggles with weather, relationship in The Five-Year Engagement

  By Melissa Anderson

  There is exactly one unexpected moment in the otherwise drearily predictable The Five-Year Engagement that, though little more than a throwaway... More >>

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  The chemistry fizzles in Notebook-lite The Lucky One

  By Chuck Wilson

  It's Nicholas Sparks' world; we just live in it. Sparks, in case you haven't scanned the paperback racks lately, is the former pharmaceutical... More >>

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  Beyond the mascot, the comprehensive Marley stirs it up

  By Melissa Anderson

  I spotted a bottle of something called Marley's Mellow Mood, "a new line of 100 percent natural relaxation beverages," in my neighborhood deli... More >>

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