You might attribute it to 9/11, or simply blame director Joel Schumacher, whose camp take on "Batman" derailed that franchise for several years. But, lately, Hollywood superhero movies have taken themselves awfully seriously.
"Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle," a stoner comedy that became a cult favorite on DVD, was a slacker quest movie -- as wonderfully oxymoronic as that sounds.
Morgan Spurlock scored a breakout hit with his documentary "Super Size Me" a few years ago, mixing satire, reportage and advocacy in the tabloid style popularized by Michael Moore. Spurlock may not have finished off junk food as we know it, but at least he could claim some responsibility for highlighting the flaws of fast food.
In "Street Kings," Keanu Reeves' bad-boy cop Tom Ludlow may not play by the rules, but the film sure does.
We're not exactly starved for sports comedies these days. Will Ferrell, in particular, seems to be working his way through every form of competition that's been devised.
"The Here and Now" might well be subtitled "Redeeming Rumi." As if to save us from the new-age squish of much contemporary rediscovery of the 13th-century Persian poet's work, Christopher Theofanidis' 33-minute sonic salon is an exhilarating setting bound for a Carnegie Hall debut April 5.
Through 2006, at least 81,000 U.S. military have been "stop-lossed" since September 11, 2001. That means they have been refused discharge and compelled to serve another tour of active duty, even though their original term has expired.
With "Drillbit Taylor," the Brat Pack meets the Frat Pack, courtesy of the House of Apatow.
Stringer is dead. Omar is dead. And soon, "The Wire" will be, too.
A mix of vast CGI spectacle and small, silly moments, the prehistoric saga "10,000 BC" is an epic in name only.
You might attribute it to 9/11, or simply blame director Joel Schumacher, whose camp take on "Batman" derailed that franchise for several years. But, lately, Hollywood superhero movies have taken themselves awfully seriously.
"Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle," a stoner comedy that became a cult favorite on DVD, was a slacker quest movie -- as wonderfully oxymoronic as that sounds.
Morgan Spurlock scored a breakout hit with his documentary "Super Size Me" a few years ago, mixing satire, reportage and advocacy in the tabloid style popularized by Michael Moore. Spurlock may not have finished off junk food as we know it, but at least he could claim some responsibility for highlighting the flaws of fast food.
In "Street Kings," Keanu Reeves' bad-boy cop Tom Ludlow may not play by the rules, but the film sure does.
We're not exactly starved for sports comedies these days. Will Ferrell, in particular, seems to be working his way through every form of competition that's been devised.
"The Here and Now" might well be subtitled "Redeeming Rumi." As if to save us from the new-age squish of much contemporary rediscovery of the 13th-century Persian poet's work, Christopher Theofanidis' 33-minute sonic salon is an exhilarating setting bound for a Carnegie Hall debut April 5.
Through 2006, at least 81,000 U.S. military have been "stop-lossed" since September 11, 2001. That means they have been refused discharge and compelled to serve another tour of active duty, even though their original term has expired.
With "Drillbit Taylor," the Brat Pack meets the Frat Pack, courtesy of the House of Apatow.
Stringer is dead. Omar is dead. And soon, "The Wire" will be, too.
A mix of vast CGI spectacle and small, silly moments, the prehistoric saga "10,000 BC" is an epic in name only.
Stringer is dead. Omar is dead. And soon, "The Wire" will be, too.
For filmmakers, the private life of Henry VIII is the kind of history lesson that writes itself: sex, adultery and decapitation, right there for the taking.
Here's how devoted Will Ferrell is to his craft: That 'fro he rocks in "Semi-Pro"? It's his real hair, the product of six months of work -- or neglect, depending on your perspective.
In the week that Blu-ray consigned HD DVD to the remainder bins of history (and standard DVD will surely follow in the foreseeable future), Michel Gondry, one of the movies' most idiosyncratic innovators, unveils a quirky, nostalgic tribute to the antique charms of VHS with "Be Kind Rewind."
A dozen producers share the bragging rights for bringing the popular Holly Black-Tony DiTerlizzi "Spiderwick" children's fantasy books to the screen. That wouldn't necessarily be grounds for optimism, so it's a relief to report that "The Spiderwick Chronicles" is free of the elephantine designs that bogged down "The Golden Compass."
Ten years ago, the adjective "Tarantinoesque" was an integral tool in any critic's arsenal. It seemed like every other young filmmaker was tramping the bloody, funny trail blazed by "Reservoir Dogs" and "Pulp Fiction"; rueful hitmen lurked around every corner.
Eva Longoria Parker gets top billing in Jeff Lowell's mediocre supernatural romantic comedy, "Over Her Dead Body," and then the movie bumps her off in the first five minutes.
Not many trailers have had the impact of the teaser for "Cloverfield," which debuted last summer attached to Michael Bay's "Transformers" bearing not so much as a title and the solitary credit "Produced by J.J. Abrams." (For some of us, it was the high point of the evening.)
Pop culture's extraordinary ability to speak across borders underpins "Persepolis," an exuberant autobiographical film and dark-horse contender for an animated feature Oscar.
At a time when American horror seems transfixed by graphic sadism, the acclaimed Spanish chiller "El Orfanato" ("The Orphanage") harks back to an older tradition of psychological scares and things that go bump in the night.
"The Bucket List," director Rob Reiner's latest, suggests dying could be the best thing that ever happens to you -- just so long as you find a lonely billionaire lying in the next bed.
It could have been overly sentimental and feel-good, this movie about a pioneering black debate team in the segregated South. But Denzel Washington, as director and star, manages to find the right tone much of the time in "The Great Debaters."
Mike Nichols' undercover history of the liberation of Afghanistan, "Charlie Wilson's War," is so witty and light on its feet, it's a pity it pulls its punches.
If anyone's going to be the last man on Earth, then Will Smith seems like an ideal candidate.
Laura Linney and Philip Seymour Hoffman, two of our best screen actors, get the chance to develop subtle, detailed characterizations in the engaging, sympathetic comedy "The Savages," the first film in almost 10 years from "Slums of Beverly Hills" writer-director Tamara Jenkins.
History is repeating itself. More than 50 years ago, Hollywood embraced big-screen formats (CinemaScope, VistaVision) and 3-D to protect the movie business from television. Now, with the box office under threat from at-home viewing, industry watchers have noted spectacular returns for features released on the large-screen IMAX circuit.
In "No Country for Old Men," the Coen brothers' masterly film of Cormac McCarthy's 2005 novel, a professional killer lugs around an ungainly contraption, a pressurized air canister with a strap, a hose and (at the end of it) a metal prod. It's the kind of stun gun they might use in a slaughterhouse.
The gangster is an outsider. The gangster takes all that "Land of Opportunity" stuff and shoves it in his pocket.
The gangster is an outsider. The gangster takes all that "Land of Opportunity" stuff and shoves it in his pocket.
So far as I can see, Steve Carell is a rather unremarkable fellow -- which makes him quite an unusual movie star.
With the exception of his character turn in last year's "Hollywoodland," Ben Affleck hasn't exactly distinguished himself with his choice of roles of late. Indeed, he's become such a media punching bag there may be a temptation to hyperbolize his first directing effort, "Gone Baby Gone," based on fellow Bostonian Dennis Lehane's novel. The truth is he's done a damn good job.
Irony is on the outs. This fall it's fashionable to show your true colors, and moviemakers are straining to impress with the kind of moral seriousness we haven't seen in American cinema since the 1970s.
"The Heartbreak Kid" is funny enough compared to other recent movies by the Farrelly brothers, whose last four or five flicks have delivered only lackluster laughs.
Perhaps it was the daily bombardment of media imagery that deterred filmmakers from confronting the Vietnam War until after U.S. troops were safely home. With Iraq it's different. The steady drip of spin and punditry conceals as much as it reveals, and Hollywood is stepping in to fill the breach.
Hollywood's favorite outlaw, Jesse James, is usually portrayed as a folk hero.
What world are we living in? That's the question that kept coming up again and again over the course of the Toronto International Film Festival, which wraps this weekend.
What world are we living in? That's the question that kept coming up again and again over the course of the Toronto International Film Festival, which wraps this weekend.
Talk about feast or famine! After a summer of high-tech amusement park rides, for a film fan it can feel like it's been months since there was anything worth seeing at the movies -- which makes arriving at the Toronto International Film Festival all the more disorientating.
For a good part of the last century, and certainly throughout Hollywood's golden age, the Western was a staple in any boy's imaginative diet. The lore was so deeply engrained, it seemed to stand for America itself.
For four months, movie theaters have been dominated by a succession of blockbusters from the usual suspects -- Bruckheimer, Spielberg, Disney, Rowling -- supplemented by a handful of newcomers (Seth Rogen and Shia LaBeouf, welcome to the big time).
With "Superbad," producer Judd Apatow ("Knocked Up," "The 40-Year-Old Virgin") has created another cockeyed hit.
It's not easy, being Bourne again. It means a lot of miles, a lot of challenges, and all for uncertain ends. And you never know what you'll have to explain: "My fight is not with you," Matt Damon's amnesiac rogue CIA agent, evading capture in Moscow, says to a local cop in Russian before beating a nonviolent retreat.
After 18 years and 400 episodes of a show that refuses to grow old, "The Simpsons" finally graduates to a movie theater near you. It doesn't take Homer long (about two minutes) to ask the obvious question: What kind of sucker pays for something he can watch at home for free?
Nikki Blonsky. The name doesn't exactly sing. It's at least as flat -- and, if you'll pardon the expression, as "ethnic" -- as Tracy Turnblad, the dance-crazy Baltimore teenager Ms. Blonsky plays in "Hairspray."
The most expensive toy commercial ever made, "Transformers," Michael Bay's live-action film about the surprisingly durable Hasbro product line, is long, loud and altogether less than meets the eye.
Here's how bad "License to Wed" is: Even the outtakes at the end are lame.
America's most inspired polemicist -- and most polarizing filmmaker -- Michael Moore returns to the fray with his first movie since "Fahrenheit 9/11" broke box-office records and challenged George W. Bush's White House.
"Live Free or Die Hard" is the sort of movie you approach like last year's "Basic Instinct 2" or "Rocky Balboa."
The filmmakers behind all these comic-book adaptations always insist they won't come back for more unless the sequels can top the originals. The "Fantastic Four" gang has managed to outdo itself the second time around -- and still make a bad movie.
In the new Nancy Drew feature film -- her first since 1939 -- the youthful detective celebrates her birthday, but she's careful not to reveal her age.
Look up the word "caper" in the dictionary, you'll find it's a prickly shrub or a frolicsome leap, a romp or gambol -- as well as an informal word for a crime, such as a theft or a heist, usually involving deception.
In a summer set for domination by inflated franchise movies in exhausting (and often exhausted) mega-mode, "Knocked Up" is a designated sleeper, the little movie that could -- and should -- clean up.
The monstrously popular but desperately hit-and-miss "Shrek" series continues on its merry way in its inevitable third installment, even if the ogre himself is in danger of being sidetracked altogether.
"28 Days Later," a zombie movie on speed, pictured the United Kingdom as a desolate wasteland just a month after a homicidal virus ("Rage") entered the general population.
New York's most famous webslinger finally pulls body and soul together in "Spider-Man 3," an extravagant three-ring circus of a movie from director Sam Raimi, but it's not without a struggle.
"Does it bother you that I call you 'Willy'?" Ted Crawford (Anthony Hopkins) inquires of prosecuting attorney Willy Beachum (Ryan Gosling). "Very well then: Willy ..." Hopkins teases out every ounce of absurdity he can find in the name. A boy's name, surely, not a name for a high-powered attorney?
Six thousand years before the Fellowship of the Ring, long before anyone had even seen a Hobbit, the elves and men of Middle-earth quaked at the power of the dark lord Morgoth.
Back when Kirk Douglas and Spencer Tracy were on the job you could spot a newshound by his rolled-up sleeves, the way he wore his fedora and his two-fingered typing style (with a smoke and a flask nearby).
When filmmakers talk about how great the movies were back in the 1970s, they're usually thinking about "The Godfather," "Chinatown," or "Dog Day Afternoon."
They say that figure skating requires the elegance of a royal court, the grace of a ballerina, the speed of a sprinter, the balance of a tightrope walker, the endurance of a marathon runner, the coordination of a juggler, the strength of a high jumper and the rhythm of a dancer.
When Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird idly sketched perpendicular reptiles wearing ninja masks and bearing nunchaku in 1984, it was primarily for their own amusement. They gave them a name that was also a logo, and having nothing more profitable to do at the time, they inked out their first comic book, a spoofy homage to Frank Miller and Marvel Comics.
The name of the movie is "Shooter," and for a while director Antoine Fuqua is right on target with this claustrophobic tale of conspiracies, lies and double-crosses.
The fanboys are raring for this one. As of Wednesday, two days before "300" opened, the Internet Movie Database gave director Zack Snyder's historical epic a user rating of 8.6 out of 10, based on more than 7,000 votes. The breakdown reveals that 6,000 of the voters are males under the age of 29, and that more than 80 percent rated the film a perfect 10. (The figures weren't much changed as of Friday.)
It took Hollywood only two years to produce a fictionalized account of the Zodiac killing spree that terrorized San Francisco in 1969.
Even as the great and good assemble for the annual orgy of self-congratulation that is the Oscars ceremony, you have to wonder if there has ever been a greater disconnect between the films up for the awards and the movies the studios are pumping out on a weekly basis.
In February 2001 Attorney General John Ashcroft announced that veteran FBI agent Robert Hanssen had been arrested for treason.
There's something endearingly quaint about the images and ideas presented in "Bridge to Terabithia," the notion that the most troubling force in a kid's life could be the fear of a bully on the school bus, and that frolicking in the woods could provide the perfect escape.
"Music and Lyrics" is a weird little hybrid of a romantic comedy that's simultaneously too fluffy and not whimsical enough.
It only took 16 minutes for Anthony Hopkins to sear the terrifying Hannibal Lecter into the minds of moviegoers in 1991's "The Silence of the Lambs." "Silence" author Thomas Harris needed more than a decade to write the follow-up "Hannibal," and seven more to come up with "Hannibal Rising."
For Jason Kohn, the hardest thing at the Sundance Film Festival was the silence.
The rhythmic step dancing is infectious in the otherwise formulaic underdog flick "Stomp the Yard" -- so much so, you'll want to see more of it and less of a plot.
Nick Cassavetes' true-crime drama "Alpha Dog," which premiered at last year's Sundance Film Festival, has already had its own day in court. After the cops finally caught up with the basis for one of the film's characters, Jesse James Hollywood, his defense attorney moved to block the film's release -- a motion dismissed by the court last month.
Mel Gibson's bloody epic "Apocalypto" debuted as the No. 1 weekend movie, proving the filmmaker still can deliver a winner despite his drunken-driving arrest and anti-Semitic rant last summer.
Having crucified Jesus in excruciating detail in his last film, and allowed himself to be drawn and quartered at considerable length in "Braveheart," Mel Gibson's fetish for movie martyrdom is as well known as his taste for claret.
By rights he should be well into middle age, but James Bond turns 21 (movies, that is) here with a new look and a fresh start.
"Borat" is so gut-bustingly funny it should carry a health warning.
The current vogue for movies splintered into a social cross-section goes global with "Babel," the third in a trilogy of triptychs from writer Guillermo Arriaga and director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu.
Clint Eastwood was 14 when Battle of Iwo Jima took place in 1945, old enough to know how Joe Rosenthal's famous picture vouched for victory and -- with a little help from John Wayne's "Sands of Iwo Jima" -- endowed the Marine Corps with a mythic luster that persists to this day.
Sarah (Kate Winslet) tells herself she's "a researcher studying the behavior of boring suburban women," an anthropologist of the neighborhood. It helps her cope with a routine built around her toddler's needs, at least for a little while.
What goes around comes around. No filmmaker is more movie-savvy than Martin Scorsese, and he, in turn, has influenced a whole generation of directors around the world.
Our children's book specialist, Andrew Oglesby, has turned 7, and with age has come experience. A little, anyway -- two other stories' worth.
Violinist Joshua Bell proves that art, like science, loves an "elegant" formula when Sony Classical releases his new Grammy-worthy CD on September 5: "Voice of the Violin."
The consolation of great music is gathered quickly this week, from one end of this hot summer to another, and just in time.
Leave the pastel T-shirt and linen suit in the closet and put on some socks.
Children's books don't always engage the audience they're intended for, which is why we asked 6-year-old Andrew Oglesby, son of CNN.com staffer Christy Oglesby, to review a selection of books for young readers.
When adults review children's books, they often focus on the simplicity of the language. Or the beauty of the artwork. Or the appropriateness of the subject matter.
Hans Zimmer's soundtrack for "The Da Vinci Code," Ron Howard's anxiously awaited cinematic gospel according to Dan Brown, is that most powerful of envoys: A model of restraint.
The assassination of Abraham Lincoln is one of those historic events about which Americans believe they know a great deal. Yet a great deal of what most Americans "know" is wrong.
An advertising executive once noted, "People forget how fast you did a job -- but they remember how well you did it." Columbia University professor James Shapiro is reminding us how quickly a certain job was done.
If you could make an El Nino-style map that registered cultural collaborations in music, that familiar red hotspot might shift from the Pacific to another sea.
"If the doors of perception were cleansed," wrote the English poet, painter and mystic William Blake, "everything would appear to man as it is: infinite." And two of the nominated works in the Grammys' best choral performance category -- one of them a setting of Blake's visionary writings -- give voice to that concept.
People like to think that being a movie reviewer is the cushiest job around. Paul Clinton wouldn't argue the point: He loved his job.
Always a heavy, if lilting, presence on the classical scene, the music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart may seem to be waiting on every headset you put on this year.
At this point in his career Steven Soderbergh could get financial backing to make a movie about the phone book. With "Bubble," he might as well have.
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