Michael Shannon gets the thankless task of trying to humanize Wall Street's capitalist swine Gordon Gekko, right down to the speech about how hard work never really helped anybody get ahead and the passing of the moral buck on to the whole rotten, rigged, remorseless system. (Thankless because ...

Generation Y gets its web-slinger, and as cash-grab reboots go, it’s not bad. This time, high-school dweeb Peter Parker isn’t such a nice guy at the outset: he’s a New Yorker, after all, and on top of that, he’s an orphan with a dad-shaped chip on his shoulder. And he’s ...

Muffled drama, in milky light and molasses-y dialect, about a young Brit, a Mancunian, released from prison to start a new life under a new name, unable to outrun his past. It might have more impact if you could comprehend more than every third word. With Andrew Garfield, Peter Mullan, ...

A Terry Gilliam exercise in excess, as dense, as heavy, as torpifying as a Christmas fruitcake. (Or as Brazil, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, The Brothers Grimm.) The muffled narrative, revolving around an immortal travelling showman, his magic-mirror portal to the realm of imagination, and his deal with the Devil, ...

Topics on the table: the war on terror, the lack of a battle plan to wage it, the governmental policy of disinformation, the complicity of the press in all this, the general lowering of journalistic standards, the apathy of the younger generation, the ivory-towerism of academe, and (if that's not ...

Low-profile science fiction, so light on the hardware, the décor, the couture of the genre, so mundane in all its trappings, as to skirt classification, operating in a borderland, a no-man’s-land, occupied by the likes of On the Beach, Lord of the Flies, maybe Daniel Petrie’s Resurrection, maybe Todd Haynes’s ...

Not just one movie; three separate but connected movies set in 1974, 1980, and 1983, with three separate and unconnected directors (Julian Jarrold, James Marsh, Anand Tucker, in order), and three separate protagonists (a mop-haired cub reporter, a cold-case special investigator, and a portly attorney, played in turn by Andrew ...

Not just one movie; three separate but connected movies set in 1974, 1980, and 1983, with three separate and unconnected directors (Julian Jarrold, James Marsh, Anand Tucker, in order), and three separate protagonists (a mop-haired cub reporter, a cold-case special investigator, and a portly attorney, played in turn by Andrew ...

Not just one movie; three separate but connected movies set in 1974, 1980, and 1983, with three separate and unconnected directors (Julian Jarrold, James Marsh, Anand Tucker, in order), and three separate protagonists (a mop-haired cub reporter, a cold-case special investigator, and a portly attorney, played in turn by Andrew ...

Martin Scorsese’s over-inflated cross-cultural Catholic history drama focuses on a pair of fledgling 17th-century Jesuit priests, Father Rodrigues (Andrew Garfield) and Father Garrpe (Adam Driver), who embark on a mission to Japan, hoping to rescue their absentee mentor, Father Ferreira (Liam Neeson). Apparently, at 74, and with almost 60 features, ...

Everything you never wanted to know about the advent of Facebook, where “friends” gather on the Internet. An amorphous series of flashbacks from the depositions of two separate lawsuits takes you through the steps by which a socially inept (how ironic!) Harvard computer nerd stumbled upon “a once-in-a-generation holy-shit idea” ...