If you recently had a close encounter with the howling demon known as Hurricane Sandy, you might have a renewed belief in global warming. If not, consider yourself lucky, then see Chasing Ice, director Jeff Orlowski’s beautiful yet sobering documentary about the world’s rapidly melting ice caps. His guide is…

It’s Nicholas Sparks’s world; we just live in it. Sparks, in case you haven’t scanned the paperback racks lately, is the former pharmaceutical salesman who’s written sixteen bestsellers since 1995, when The Notebook was plucked from the slush pile by a wily publisher. The Notebook was the third Sparks work…

Hit men have bills to pay, too, and sometimes a kid to feed and an anxious wife to placate, even as they worry that their reputation in the bad-guy underworld is slipping. In the suburbs of Sheffield, England, a former soldier named Jay (a superb Neil Maskell) is stressed to…

Since we’re a heartbeat away from being sick to death of this month’s crop of Oscar-seeking masterpieces, we’ve decided to cast a quick glance forward to the ten 2011 films we’re excited to see. We’ve seen some of the below, and make no promises for the others, but, as ever,…

No Damn Trespassing, Beware of Mule!” warns the hand-carved sign posted near the high country cabin of Tennessee recluse Felix Bush (Robert Duvall), whose abrupt decision to re-engage with the larger world propels Get Low, an imperfect but rewarding new film. It’s 1938, and Felix, who’s been in a self-imposed…

Their new suburban house is lovely, the neighbors friendly, the nursery ready — and now all that Göran (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his husband, Sven (Torkel Petersson), need to make their familial dreams come true is an actual child. A letter from Swedish Social Services promises that a baby is on…

Completing his multi-film vendetta against the world’s tourist trade, German-born director Roland Emmerich sends the mother of all storms to level the Washington Monument, the Eiffel Tower and a priest-filled Vatican City, among other locales, in his newest end-times thriller, 2012. From Independence Day (1996) to The Day After Tomorrow…

In the lushly produced but dispiriting new comedy The Ugly Truth, Katherine Heigl stars as Abby Richter, a successful but hopelessly uptight TV producer who is also perpetually single. Ever efficient, Abby does background checks on the men she meets, and takes along on the first date a ten-point checklist…

“The cinema is not a slice of life, but a piece of cake,” Alfred Hitchcock once said, and if that’s true — and who are we to dispute the Master? — then summertime is when we gorge (unhealthily, most of the time, on ear-splitting smash-’em-ups and nerd-filled sex comedies). This…

If the dream of every comic is to have his humor live on long after he’s left the stage, then the late Bernie Mac has exited this world on a high note. Soul Men, a comedy completed shortly before Mac’s untimely death in August, is no classic, but the comedian,…

Despite his reputation as that rarest of creatures — a Hollywood intellectual — new evidence suggests that Steve Martin reads…prepare yourself…thrillers and spy novels. Or at least that’s the only conclusion one can draw from the “story by” credit the comedian receives on Traitor, an uneven yet engrossing terrorist thriller…

Hollywood’s Endless Superhero Summer rolls on with the arrival of Hellboy II: The Golden Army from Pan’s Labyrinth director Guillermo del Toro, but before this review goes any further, I must confess — head hanging low in shame — that I haven’t read a comic book since I was twelve…

Explosions, pratfalls and robots, heroes, aliens and blondes: It must be summertime at the movies. Beyond the flash, though, it’s striking to note just how many movies will require us to actually think this summer. (Aren’t we supposed to save thinking for the fall?) Maybe it’s the election, but there…

“When you sleep with the king, it ceases to be a private matter.” And so it comes to pass that young Mary Boleyn (Scarlett Johansson) must stand before her father, Sir Thomas (Mark Rylance), and her uncle, the Duke of Norfolk (David Morrissey), and report the nitty-gritty details of having…

As one of what novelist Stephen King calls his Constant Readers, I was as jazzed as every other monster-lovin’ geek when word came that filmmaker Frank Darabont was making a movie of King’s classic novella The Mist. Adapting King’s The Shawshank Redemption (1994) and The Green Mile (1999) brought the…

There have already been critical rumblings about the extreme violence in Shoot ¹Em Up, but it’s hard to get too worked up about a film whose very title announces its maker’s intent. You just can’t stay mad at a picture that early on has the hero helping a woman give…

It is as you’ve always suspected: Rob Zombie’s house is way cooler than yours. For one thing, the punk/metal god turned filmmaker has a twelve-foot stuffed polar bear in his living room. (Zombie to dumbstruck interviewer: “I know, right? How fuckin’ big is that bear?”) The bear presides over dozens…

Chris Tucker still believes in Michael Jackson. You can tell because in the very first scene of Rush Hour 3, the actor-comedian squeals melodically, grabs his crotch and throws his arms up to the heavens. All that’s missing is a giant off-stage fan to make Tucker’s shirt billow out behind…