If real life were like Wrong, Quentin Dupieux’s sweetly unnerving experiment in ambient fucked-uppedness, your phone would ring before you’ve finished this sentence, and the words you haven’t gotten to yet would be read aloud to you by a voice you’ve never heard before. Then, while you’re at lunch someplace,…

Like the blood that gushes forth from the elevators of the Overlook Hotel, brilliant/ridiculous theories of what Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining is really about have for years surged madly and memorably — especially online, where the Internet’s dead-ends, blind links and back-where-you-started arguments just might be another part of the…

Elisabeth Moss’s face is far from the only reason to savor Top of the Lake, Jane Campion’s smart, bracing, hugely enjoyable mystery rural noir Top of the Lake, which premieres on the Sundance Channel on Monday, March 18. But that pale-to-radiant instrument of hers — a mouth that suggests her…

Steve Carell’s gift is for men who might drown in their own obliviousness. Like his Daily Show reporter, or The Office’s Michael Scott, his forty-year-old virgin lived in terror that someone might catch on to the fact that he knows nothing about subjects he purports to have mastered. When his…

Twenty minutes into the first full-length movie based on L. Frank Baum’s most beloved novel, a duck pukes into the face of Larry Semon, the star and director. Semon’s 1925 flop, titled The Wizard of Oz, opens and closes with a Geppetto-esque toymaker reading to his granddaughter from a well-loved…

It’s a bad omen when, early on in Oz the Great and Powerful, we learn that the full given name of its wizard is Oscar — also the name of the ceremony that star James Franco once presided over as calamitously as he does this sagging Disney tent pole, a…

In the spare yet grand Happy People: A Year in the Taiga, co-director and tour guide Werner Herzog talks us through one season cycle in the life of a not-of-this-century trapper in the Siberian town of Bakhta, population 300. We follow Anatoly Soloviev puttering through the forested vastness and over…

The murder of the children should be the most disturbing thing. But for many viewers, that isn’t the case in the four films chronicling the arrest, conviction, and eighteen-year incarceration of Damien Echols, Jessie Misskelley and Jason Baldwin for a crime they didn’t commit. The crime-scene photos of three young…

Here’s a question you can spit back next time someone complains that our popular culture is top-to-bottom depraved: “Then why are our high-school witches, vampires and superheroes so passionate about their abstinence?” That glitter-pored Twilight hunk and Andrew Garfield’s Spider-Man have won tween hearts and Hollywood billions by cavalierly refusing…

Just a week or so after the Pentagon reversed its ban on allowing female soldiers into combat, here’s another breakthrough, of a sort: The funniest scenes in the confused and shaggy comedy Identity Thief are of Melissa McCarthy and Jason Bateman beating the hell out of each other. McCarthy —…

Please, for his own good, somebody clap Dustin Hoffman into a chastity belt. Based on what Al Pacino suffers in Stand Up Guys and the identical humiliations visited upon Robert De Niro in Little Fockers, it seems that Hollywood will not be satisfied until it has speared a hypodermic into…

From its first moments, the wish-fulfillment political-campaign comedy Knife Fight serves as an accidental demonstration of the value of staying on message. After introducing us to Rob Lowe as ace political fixer Paul and Jamie Chung as an assistant made queasy by the pragmatic cynicism her job demands, the film…

Although they almost certainly have plans for striking new projects that expand our understanding of what documentaries can be, Bill and Turner Ross — the co-directors, -producers, -camera operators and -troublemakers behind Tchoupitoulas — could do posterity a service if they simply resigned themselves to replicating this one-night-in-New Orleans documentary…

Sadly, country songwriters stand as nearly the only entertainers in our popular culture who craft memorable art on the subject of marriage, the state in which just fewer than half of Americans spend the majority of their lives. A few years back, Brad Paisley, one of Nashville’s best, wrote and…

It’s dispiriting that a film about the romantic life of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who cultivated a small coterie of mistresses, should exhibit so little interest in what so engaged its hero: the women’s individual hearts and minds. Instead, Hyde Park on Hudson quickly introduces us (and FDR) to the president’s…

The first few minutes of Lincoln play out like a parody of the expectations of Steven Spielberg’s detractors. The Great Emancipator rests like a humble Solomon upon a hard wooden chair, surrounded by freely mixing black and white soldiers of that great war of his. One black soldier dares to…

Perhaps you’ve lost faith in movies about amusingly digressive criminals. Maybe you believe it’s no longer possible to be pleasurably jolted by inventive swearing, from-no-place head shots, and post-everything structural flourishes. Certainly you have no reason to expect blood-splattered poetry or throat-clearing laughter from yet another movie in which Los…

The story goes that while filming in Tunisia in the summer of 1980, Steven Spielberg avoided the dysentery that afflicted most of the cast and crew of Raiders of the Lost Ark by holing up in his hotel room with a suitcase full of SpaghettiOs. Like most studio-approved behind-the-scenes errata,…