How would those Bronze Age storytellers who shaped and handed down the myths of Ancient Greece fare in a modern screenwriting seminar? All that elusive, improvisatory strangeness, that alien sense of causality, that emphasis on origins, not just of franchisable characters but of everything in the natural world, right down…

Hey, Hollywood can still do romance! Even since the marketeers worked out that the kiss kiss bang bang formula could be profitably split, with bang bang movies getting wide releases and the kiss kisses sold only to that slim niche demographic called “American women,” movie love stories had gotten frustratingly…

“I kept thinking she was the ugly duckling who was going to turn into a swan,” a 40-ish loudmouth complained as the crowd trudged out of a preview screening of The To Do List. “But she was an ugly duckling all the way through!” He was talking to two women…

Like first sex, writer-director Maggie Carey’s debut feature, The To Do List, is quick and messy, fitfully pleasurable, full of promise but not quite adept at getting everyone off. It’s an impossibly huge deal yet also a modest achievement, something we have to go through but that will no doubt…

With an offhand precision that suggests he might prove one of his generation’s major actors, Michael Cera lays bare two specific human weaknesses in writer-director Sebastián Silva’s altered states/group dynamics road drama Crystal Fairy — weaknesses you’ll likely recognize from life rather than from other movies. The first is the…

Something like half the running time of the engaging new don’t-go-in-the-basement thriller The Conjuring is devoted to showing us characters proceeding slowly into the basement, or into the maws of basement-like places we know they shouldn’t go, often with just matches or a flashlight to guide them. Twice, deliciously, they’re…

Since it opens with a suicide bombing in downtown Tel Aviv, and since its mystery plot involves an attempt to track down a sheik whose public expectorations call for the slaughter of Israeli civilians, The Attack is most avowedly “about” terrorism. But that’s a subject, not the subject. The film,…

Among the revelations you’re likely to experience during the course of Gideon’s Army, Dawn Porter’s vital, moving new HBO documentary (premiering July 1) about the struggle of conscience waged by public defenders in the deep South: “Everyone is so young.” Not just the suspects — mostly black and mostly broke…

Surprising proof that Hollywood still can craft a memorable studio comedy, Roland Emmerich’s White House Down stands as a singular achievement in parody, its auteur’s intentions be damned. It’s not just a pitch-perfect attack on every risible plot point afflicting today’s all-exposition-and-explosions filmmaking, it’s also a mad liberal’s vision of…

“You cannot build a business on copyright infringement,” points out Ian Rogers, the CEO of Topspin, not too long into Downloaded, director Alex Winter’s too-breezy account of Napster, the teensy app that liberated digital music, destroyed the record industry, and swallowed some $500 million worth of loans and seed money…

Used to be to get famous in the rightwing blowhard racket, you had to have an act. Not today. Has anyone ever once thought, “Oh, I can’t wait to hear what Sean Hannity’s going to say next”? (Or “squeak next,” in Hannity’s case.) Consider this scene from the funny, arresting…

Terrorizing children in their bedrooms remains the existential concern of the toothy blobs, hams, and pom-pom-furred Wild Things that populate Monsters movies, many of whom look like gummy nothings long stuck to the bottom of Pixar’s junk drawer. Their very lives depend upon coaxing night-screams from human kids, a premise…

From the peak of Anchorman to the nadir of The Incredible Burt Wonderstone, the formula for studio comedies of the last 20 years has been simple: Dude acts like a dick for an hour, turns blandly sweet toward the end, and then everyone on the DVD commentary can claim to…

George R. R. Martin took a break from killing Starks today to send us this list of the notes he would send to the producers of TV shows if he were put in charge of them. [NOTE: We made this up.] Here’s what he dashed off for us, in between…

Here’s a category idea for bar trivia: Collect one-sentence plot summaries of young-adult novel series and R-rated horror films, and see who can distinguish which from which. The one where the kids kill each other for sport is approved by school districts for extra-credit reading, as is the one where…

The surprise twist in the new M. Night Shyamalan film is that the film is directed by M. Night Shyamalan, a fact that the movie—like the posters and commercials—won’t admit until after you’ve already sat through it. While at heart a Pinkett-Smith family bonding project, the kind of sci-fi play…

“Least you got to see a motherfucker crucify himself,” Richard Pryor spits in the most surprising footage director Marina Zenovich has unearthed for her new documentary Richard Pryor: Omit the Logic. The scene is of Pryor’s last great cock-up just before his last, great comeback. Pacing restlessly before a Hollywood…

Turns out, Ricky Jay is one of those guys who has to sit in the restaurant with his back to the wall. That’s not just because the sleight-of-hand master and historian of magic is — as interviewees in this new doc attest — a cantankerous sort who is thick with…

There are times during the affecting tumult of What Maisie Knew when you may think, “At last, a first-rate American movie about what being a kid actually feels like!” And then there are times when, despite the scrupulousness of co-directors Scott McGehee and David Siegel’s adherence to the perspective of…

There’s one key truth that separates the tank-topped gearheads of the Fast and Furious movies from the rest of us. Every problem these lugnuts face can be solved by doing the one thing these lugnuts love most: driving really fast. It’s what it would be like if you could deal…

Has anyone ever been so perfectly cast as Matthew McConaughey in Dazed and Confused? Sculpted entirely of charisma and cheekbones yet still seedier than a stash of gym-locker pot, McConaughey’s radiant stoner exemplified high school promise gone bad. he looked like the little man of top of trophies, just horny,…

One of the most beguiling of the many stories all knotted up in Salman Rushdie’s brilliant, baggy, exhausting 1981 novel Midnight’s Children concerns a lovelorn doctor, his beautiful patient, and that timeless exemplar of old-world prudishness: a sheet with a hole in it. The patient, Naseem, not yet of marriageable…