Dan Kois

One single scene captures the tricky tonal balance of Jonathan Levine's cancer comedy 50/50. Adam, a straight-edge radio producer played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, has just finished his first round of chemotherapy. It was tough, but the kindly gents IV'd next to him (Philip Baker Hall and Matt Frewer) made it...

Great," sighs the wicked witch in Tangled, a CG-animation spin on the Rapunzel story, "now I'm the bad guy." Mother Gothel, the frizzy-haired, sharp-featured enchantress with the inimitable voice of Donna Murphy, is Disney's first villainess whose chief crime is being an underminer, and the heroine of Disney's fiftieth animated...

A teenage witch stands trembling behind her unsuspecting mother and father, wand raised. Obliviate, she whispers, and her parents' eyes go glassy, their memories erased. On the mantel, the girl's image disappears from the family's photos. Blinking back tears, she walks into the street, the link between herself and her...

Other people besides James Franco appear in 127 Hours, but as they're unimportant, they will not be mentioned in this review. Danny Boyle's film — based on the story of Aron Ralston, who in 2003 cut off his own arm after being stuck for five days under a rock in...

A quartet of uneven TV pilots posing as a full-length documentary, Seth Gordon's anthology Freakonomics pulls case studies from Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt's best-selling book of pop math and hands them over to famous doc filmmakers to make their own. Gordon (King of Kong) knits together the resulting shorts...