It's hard to believe that writer/director David O. Russell's first feature film was an incest comedy called Spanking the Monkey. Now, with his track record of critically-acclaimed dramedies, he has his pick of Hollywood's A-list talent, some of whom reached that level because of him. So it's no surprise that...

I've been a fan of the Coen brothers since their second film, Raising Arizona, in 1987. Back then, Joel and Ethan Coen were definitely the weird kids with a distinct voice, but it was one a lot of people just didn't get. But over the course of their 30-year career,...

For a long time, many have criticized the dearth of good leading female roles in movies. If Meryl Streep made a movie in a given year you could reliably expect her to win the Best Actress Oscar (often for doing yet another impeccable accent), while the more interesting race, performances,...

When I reviewed 12 Years A Slave, which is based on the true story of a free black man who was kidnapped and brought to the Deep South as a slave in 1841, I said that it might help America come to grips with the horrors of slavery...

If you're a fan of Bill Watterson's Calvin & Hobbes comic strip, you could probably name a dozen things that make it such a fascinating, funny, and enduring piece of popular art almost 20 years after Watterson decided to call it quits. Maybe it's Calvin's boundless imagination and capacity for...

Thanks to computer graphics, movies no longer have any limits when it comes to what they can create with special effects. However, I have a bit of a soft spot when it comes to movies with sci-fi or magical aspects that use little or no special effects at all, since...

Ender's Game is the award-winning, best-selling first book of a science fiction series written by Orson Scott Card that was released in 1985. Card had originally said that Ender's Game was unfilmable, but director Gavin Hood's vision of Card's story earned Card's stamp of approval, with Card even signing on...

Darren Aronofsky's 2010 film Black Swan is a fascinating look at inhibition, obsession, madness, and the quest for perfection in the ballet world with an Oscar-winning performance by Natalie Portman. But nearly all of the interviews with the makers and stars of the film seemed to be fixated on the...

The original movie of Stephen King's horror novel Carrie was released in 1976 and, in a rare turn for a scary movie, earned Oscar nominations for actresses Sissy Spacek and Piper Laurie. Now, over 35 years later, Carrie has been remade, prompting many to ask why anyone would bother remaking...

The doldrums after the summer blockbuster season are over, placing us in the Oscar/early holiday season. And an early frontrunner for awards is 12 Years A Slave, a film based on the true story of a free black man living in New York State in 1841 who was...

Earlier this year, I reviewed the fantastic Danish film A Hijacking (my review here), which chronicles the tense, maddening, months-long standoff between Somali pirates, the ship's crew, and the CEO of the company that owns the ship. A Hijacking did well in festivals and is more of a...

To make this review of Alfonso Cuarón's space disaster thriller Gravity, I downloaded some studio-approved clips from a PR website. Even though I saw Gravity in IMAX 3D the night before, as I watched the clips on my computer, I found my palms sweating, my heart racing, and my head...

While Mt. Everest is the world's tallest peak, K2, the world's 2nd highest peak which sits near the China/Pakistan border, is considered the more difficult and dangerous of the two to climb, reserved only for true mountaineers. And how dangerous? Of the 300 climbers who made it to the top...

One can argue when was the exact moment when internet porn reached absolute ubiquity in the networked world, but no one can argue that we're certainly there now. And while it's considered hip and liberal (and arguably correct) to see porn as something that's relatively harmless (especially when compared to...

In May 2009, George Tiller, one of just a handful of doctors in the US who performed late-term abortions, was murdered in the foyer of his church in Wichita, Kansas by an anti-abortion extremist. His spirit and dedication to women's health infuses After Tiller, a documentary that follows...

As a society, we've become more sympathetic and knowledgeable about addiction and no longer see it purely as a failure of morals and personal fortitude. However, the concept of sex addiction is still greeted with skepticism, if not eye rolls. Considered primarily a male condition common in good-looking or wealthy...

While more and more Americans are jumping on the organic cruelty-free bandwagon, the subject of GMOs -- which stands for Genetically Modified Organisms -- has gotten comparatively little attention. GMOs are what results when an organism has DNA jammed into its genetic code to cause a desired trait, from high...

With fame considered the most valuable commodity these days, it's expected that anyone in a position to know intimate details about a celebrity's life is expected to spill the beans in tell-all books and interviews, regardless of the legal or moral ramifications of doing so. That's one of the things...

This summer has felt like a particularly strong one for women in independent film. Greta Gerwig got things started in May with her fantastic performance in Noah Baumbach's Frances Ha. Both writer/director Maggie Carey and star Aubrey Plaza put a feminine spin on the mostly male teen sex...

As of Monday, Ashton Kutcher's Steve Jobs biopic Jobs tiptoed into the black with a total domestic box office of $12.3 million to offset its $12 million budget. However, since a movie typically needs to make roughly three times its budget to cover marketing costs to be considered...