Past Stories
Man of Mystery
There are certain people whose exploits or accomplishments are so colorful they pass straight from reality into the realm of legend. Often, those legendary figures are outlaws who disappeared before they could be brought to jus...
Gunning For God
It’s a blazingly hot and humid day in the rural small town of Albany, Ga., in June 2010, and Ken Bevel is having a very hard day. He’s been carjacked repeatedly, each time jumping onto the driver’s side door of…
Beating the Odds
Hollywood loves making movies about people struggling with deadly diseases, whether it’s the race against time in Contagion or tearjerkers like Love Story and Beaches, in which the characters who contract cancer wring emotion...
Playing for Passion
All too often the concept of “may the best man win” has come to mean that the side with the most money gets to enjoy a cakewalk to victory. But as the world has devolved a win at all costs…
Two Kinds of Drive
While it may not merit an Oscar, the new comedy I Don’t Know How She Does It offers pure comic joy, with a stellar cast of comic veterans matched by a pitch-perfect script and energetic direction that come together for…
Infectious Entertainment
Imagine your wife takes a business trip to Hong Kong and when she comes home she seems to have a truly nasty case of the flu: sweats, shakes, splotchy skin and unending coughing and sniffles. Within two days she passes…
A Higher Calling
Inside every actor is a director dying to take control of a film and show what they’re really capable of doing. Usually an actor has to reach the iconic status of a Clint Eastwood, Tom Hanks or Robert DeNiro to…
House of Horrors
There are certain primal fears that seem to affect all of us as children: fear of the dark, fear of strange noises, fear of old houses. In the new film Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark, little Sally (Bailee Madison)…
No Help Needed
After two months of gross-out comedies, superhero adventures and pointless sequels, the Oscar-worthy film The Help is actually as refreshing as a tall, cool glass of iced tea on a hot Mississippi afternoon.
The Help follows a ...
Tasty Treats in the Dog Days of Summer
With a Conan the Barbarian reboot so apparently bad that its studio, Lionsgate, is completely hiding it from critics and a Fright Night remake offering up warmed-over scares from a 1980s film that barely scored any box office r...
Ape over Rise
There are some film genres that I’m not likely to enjoy. Torture porn is one. Costume/period dramas are another. Sci-fi/fantasies rank third.
After getting a little burnt out and cranky from seeing too many movies, I found my...
Whiting Out Racism
When Bryon Widner started getting tattoos as a teenager in Albuquerque, he never imagined that he would someday be portrayed on national television as a notorious example of racial hatred. At the time, he was just a high school...
Crazy Stupid Aliens
Summer is when the movie business provides something for every taste, and this weekend offers perhaps the most ridiculously extreme examples of this longstanding practice in some time with the openings of the intelligent romant...
Comedy with Benefits
It’s easy to look at the movies coming out of Hollywood these days and declare that the movie industry has completely run out of ideas. After all, we just had the eighth installment of Harry Potter, the fourth Pirates of…
Everyone’s Everyman
Every high school has its troubled teens, whether they’re wallflowers watching the world go by or enraged outsiders who bully others—or worse, attempt Columbine-style massacres.
Terri paints an intimate portrait of one of ...
Dirty work
During my 16 years in the working world, I’ve had some pretty bad bosses. One was Glenn, a guy so high-strung and hot-tempered that he once threw a folder at my head. That happened in front of about 50 coworkers,…
A Spiritual Experience
I haven’t seen anything this startling by a U.S. director since the days of Stanley Kubrick. But, in what feels like a tribute to the Zen master, the ghostlike Terrence Malick has provided us a rare jewel of a film,…
Bad Movie
Sometimes a movie comes along that is so terrible that one can only wonder what went wrong. Bad Teacher, starring Cameron Diaz as a terrible person who somehow lands a teaching job, is such a film.
The threadbare plot revolves...
A long, strange Trip
Growing up is great. You make more money, have a better understanding of people and learn to appreciate the finer things in life. Growing old, though, sucks. Not just physically. I’m talking about the emotional toll it takes ...
Walkin’ After Midnight
Director Woody Allen has a new lover, only this time she’s the star and he’s the one basking in her glow. Who might that be? None other than the City of Lights, which Allen lovingly reveals in all her sensuous…
Everything is beautiful
Sometimes our worst problems just sneak up on us. The moment that pushes us too far with our anger, or the need to win that eventually crosses the line into a gambling addiction, the split-second of weakness that makes someone&...
What Happened?
There are two forms of reality: how things actually happened and the way in which we recall how they occurred. Two vastly different films exploring the gap between truth and perception—the raunchy American comedy The Hangover...
Madness, Dark and Light
There are many ways in which a person can escape the hardships of life, but the way that is paradoxically hardest and easiest to do is to alter one’s mind. Whether through choosing to obliterate one’s consciousness with dru...
Gross Girls
Ever since Animal House 30 years ago, raunchy comedies have been almost exclusively the realm of male actors. From Dumb and Dumber through There’s Something About Mary, on through the likes of Superbad, The 40 Year-Old Virgin...
Falling Fast
One of the greatest appeals of superhero movies lies in their ability to take ordinary humans and give them the power to do extraordinary things, whether they’re a teenager flying through New York City shooting webs in Spider...
Is Nothing Sacred?
Morgan Spurlock, who shook the fast-food world by exposing just how unhealthy a steady diet of McDonald’s menu items can be in the hit documentary Super Size Me, knows the value of a strong media image.
After forcing the ent...
Your Highness
Armed with its seemingly endless array of dick jokes, fart gags and profanity, Your Highness is an elaborate attempt at a comedy that also weaves in elements of knighthood, fantasy and science fiction spectacles and adventure...
Killer Fun
When Scream was released in 1996, it turned the movie industry upside down by breaking numerous rules of the horror genre. First, it came out at Christmastime, which was considered a horror-free zone throughout studio history. ...
