If Jane Eyre is not the greatest of the Great Books with a permanent position on required-reading lists, it may be the most frequently filmed: At least ten cinematic versions of the story have been made, dating back to the dawn of the silent era — more, if you count…

In The Adjustment Bureau, screenwriter George Nolfi’s directorial debut (an extremely loose adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s 1954 short story “Adjustment Team”), Matt Damon plays David Norris, a Brooklyn-born, bar-fight-prone congressman rocketing to the front of a Senate race apparently on the strength of his charisma and the idealism of…

Paramount, the distributor of David O. Russell’s The Fighter, celebrated its Best Director Oscar nomination by placing a “For Your Consideration” ad on the cover of Variety, touting Russell as “the comeback of the year.” It was an odd choice of phrasing, considering that The Fighter, Russell’s first feature to…

Tracking the parallel trajectories of three employees laid off from cushy corporate jobs at the same Boston-based manufacturing conglomerate, The Company Men is transparent in its ambition to capture The Way We Live Now from a sensitive and equitable — rather than a withering and satiric — point of view…

Ivan Reitman, master of the high-concept, big-budget Hollywood comedy (Ghostbusters, Dave), would seem an unlikely candidate to direct No Strings Attached, an extremely low-concept, low-key romantic comedy of contemporary sexual mores centered on the dating foibles of attractive nerds. Fully devoid of the fantasy contrivance that often sets a Reitman…

When the MPAA handed Derek Cianfrance’s Blue Valentine an NC-17 rating this fall, cynics suggested that the so-called kiss of death was better publicity for the gently experimental marriage drama than anything famously crafty distributor Harvey Weinstein could buy. When the rating was reversed last month — downgraded to an…

John Cameron Mitchell’s Rabbit Hole plops us down in the lives of Becca (Nicole Kidman) and Howie (Aaron Eckhart), fortyish bourgie marrieds rattling around an East Coast dream house. Becca and Howie’s young son was killed in an accident, and months later, the couple is trying to cope. Howie thinks…

Kelly Canter is the Courtney Love of country stars. Spectacular meltdowns on stage have forced Kelly (an inconsistently twanging Gwyneth Paltrow) into rehab. There, her decolletage decked out in black lace and a bling cross, she jams in more than one sense with singer-songwriter-janitor Beau (Tron fox Garrett Hedlund) until…

Sold — and bought — as the year’s most “intelligent” blockbuster while actually baldly insulting its audience’s intelligence, Inception both conquered the 2010 zeitgeist and helped define it. It was merely the biggest rendition of the year’s most prevalent movie theme: How do you know that what you think is…

She doesn’t sing that way because she’s had it easy.” This is how Tess (Cher), the long-suffering owner of the nightclub at the center of Burlesque, defends her new star, Ali (Christina Aguilera), to the club’s jealous, deposed marquee attraction, Nikki (Kristen Bell). The same phrase could substitute as a…

In the climax of Morning Glory, Rachel McAdams is dressed in a flesh-colored, diaphanous cocktail dress, its halter top and tight bodice giving way to spilling tulle. This is the kind of dress a screen heroine wears when a slow-building love plot is coming to a head; it is the…

A very, very loose and highly symbolic adaptation of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Gaspar Noé’s Enter the Void unfolds in four major parts. Oscar (Nathaniel Brown) is a young, drug-dealing American in Tokyo with an unusually close relationship to his stripper sister, Linda (Paz de la Huerta), and…

New York mag editor Juliette (Patricia Clarkson) travels alone to Cairo to meet her husband, who works for the United Nations in Gaza. When hubby gets stuck across the border indefinitely due to vague unrest, Tareq (Alexander Siddig), his former bodyguard, steps in as Juliette’s chaperone. Fluent in English and…

The Switch is a loose adaptation of a Jeffrey Eugenides story called “Baster,” published in The New Yorker in 1996 and deemed fit for inclusion in the 2001 best-of anthology Wonderful Town. Last week, when asked by the New Yorker’s book blog about the film — which stars Jennifer Aniston…

Salt, famously the Spy Flick Rewritten for Angelina Jolie After Tom Cruise Dropped Out, has been publicized as the cinematic equivalent of the 19th Amendment: Finally, a level playing field for female action stars! This is mostly bullshit, of course — Jolie’s Evelyn Salt is not the first action hero…

MacGruber (Will Forte), a highly decorated soldier of fortune known for “making life-saving inventions out of household materials,” faked his death and went into hiding after his fiancée (Maya Rudolph) was killed at their wedding, likely by MacGruber’s arch enemy, wealthy industrialist Dieter Von Cunth (Val Kilmer). Years later, when…

Is it an accident that Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood plays like a rousing love letter to the Tea Party movement? It’s certainly something of a surprise. When the movie was announced in 2007 with the title Nottingham, reports suggested that it would sympathize with the normally vilified Sheriff of Nottingham…

Kick-Ass, the Matthew Vaughn-directed adaptation of Mark Millar and John Romita Jr.’s graphic novel, sets itself up as an unadulterated exposé of the teenage mind. Tired of being mugged by high-school thugs in a Manhattan that’s notably scummier than the real thing, our hero, Dave Lizewski (Aaron Johnson, a hot…

We are not these people! We are a boring couple from New Jersey!” complains Claire Foster (Tina Fey) to her husband, Phil (Steve Carell), about halfway through Date Night, the latest high-gloss, middle-to-low-brow would-be blockbuster from director Shawn Levy (Cheaper by the Dozen, Just Married). Phil and Claire are middle-class,…

There’s an obvious stunt element to the casting of The Runaways: a punked-up, barely legal Kristen Stewart and a still underage, barely-dressed Dakota Fanning begging for street cred by playing dress-up as, respectively, Joan Jett and Cherie Currie, front girls of the oversexed ’70s-era teen proto-punk sensation the Runaways. Watch…

Set in the white, lower-class, upstate New York dead end of Mohawk Valley, Donal Mosher and Michael Palmieri’s October Country follows four generations of Moshers from one October 31st to the next, and, in between days of the dead, the spooks linger. Halloween itself is a Mosher obsession, a leveler…