Root for Earnest Vin Diesel in The Last Witch Hunter

Critics lampoon him as a fast/furious lug nut, a hunk of well-oiled meat who doesn’t so much act as ka-thunk his face and body through its limited gears. To hell with them. Vin Diesel may not run smoothly, but he runs with purpose and conviction, and any line of dialogue…

Bear Grylls and Ed Helms Ran Wild in Colorado — and Survived!

Adventurer, survivalist and outdoor guru Bear Grylls is the star of Running Wild with Bear Grylls, now in its second season with NBC. On each episode, viewers watch Grylls take A-list celebrities, TV stars and even a Super Bowl-winning quarterback, Drew Brees, into untamed and untouched areas around the globe for a…

Experimenter Makes Urgent Art Out of Milgram’s Notorious Study

Completing a trifecta of recent cinema suddenly fascinated with the social-science lab experiments of the Eisenhower-Nixon era, Experimenter is as cool as a grad student clamping electrodes onto a test monkey. One of our lowest-profile indie-film treasures, director Michael Almereyda never makes the same movie twice, toggling from Pixelvision experiment…

Goosebumps Honors the Vigorous Fun of R.L. Stine — for a While

Here’s a scary story for you. Somewhere in Hollywood, a cabal of producers are forever zombie-ing up the corpses of long-dead licensed properties, ever hopeful that you will continue to throw your money at familiar trademarked characters even as they eat your brains. Sometimes, when a silver moon shines just…

Richard Gere Goes Homeless — and Dares You to Watch

The good news about the Richard Gere drama about the bad news of New York’s enduring homeless crisis? Time Out of Mind, written and directed by Oren Moverman, is stubbornly, respectfully unflashy, Manhattan neorealism steeped more in reportage than in the clichés of prestige films. A prideful man slow to…

Labyrinth of Lies Pits One Prosecutor Against the Holocaust

Here’s a hair-raising assignment: Imagine you’re tasked with capturing the social and psychological complexities of a nation’s crackup within the framework of popular moviemaking. What if Gone With the Wind tried, in its swooning romance, to explicate Scarlett O’Hara’s slow-to-dawn realization of the hopeless immorality of the world she has…

Steve Jobs Digs at the Core of the Apple Icon

Aaron Sorkin opens up a new desktop icon with Steve Jobs, a briskly busy, talkative companion piece to The Social Network. Adapting Walter Isaacson’s biography of the Apple innovator — and covering much of the same ground as Alex Gibney’s documentary Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine — Sorkin’s…

Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies Finds Murk in Moral Certainty

Steven Spielberg’s true-story Cold War procedural Bridge of Spies has a wintry chill. The colors are gray and green, the skin tones pale as frozen fish, and the film stock fuzzed and snowy. Our protagonist, James Donovan (Tom Hanks), spends half the movie waylaid by a cold and takes his…

Once Upon a Crime Doc Revisits Sensational ’70s Denver Murder Case

Forty years ago, the big crime news in this wide-lapel cowtown had nothing to do with six-year-old pageant queens, high-school shooters or feuding gangbangers. The obsession of the moment was the 1975 murder of businessman Hal Levine, and the prosecution of Michael Borelli, a supposedly mobbed-up former New York police…