Novel? What novel? I went into Baz Luhrmann's 3-D, Jay Z-soundtracked The Great Gatsby assuming that the kindest, smartest approach would be to forget there was ever a book behind it. Surprisingly, the film is more attached to F. Scott Fitzgerald than I expected, and that turns out to be...

In a Lahore cafe, the Pakistan-born, Princeton-educated hero of Mira Nair's The Reluctant Fundamentalist tells an American reporter about his reaction to the World Trade Center attacks. Changez (Riz Ahmed) was as horrified as anyone - but at first there was an instinctive smile, simple "awe," as he puts it,...

Playing a sophisticated London auctioneer, James McAvoy gazes into the camera with cool, nerveless clarity as his voiceover gives us the inside tricks of protecting and stealing a painting. This opening sequence of Danny Boyle's Trance is no more than exposition with a dash of red herring, and shouldn't work...

The gigantic frizzed-out wig on Al Pacino's head might be enough to make you curious about Phil Spector, the new HBO drama written and directed by David Mamet. In a multitude of wigs as conspicuously creepy as the actual Spector's, Pacino plays the fantastically successful music producer and reputed loony-tunes...

Flying moneys, good. Flying baboons, bad. That's one difference between the classic 1939 Wizard of Oz and Oz the Great and Powerful, Disney's pricey new extravaganza with James Franco as the pre-wizard carnival con man. More important: Don't go on comparing them. The new Oz is loaded with references, some...

(Spoiler alert)

With the ultra-sharp new season of Girls, I finally understand -- though I don't agree with -- the Lena Dunham backlash. For all I know, in real life she's perfectly likable. But her character, Hannah, is the most squirm-inducing character on television. Hannah's total self-absorption (as if the...

Season 3 of Downton Abbey -- as soapy, dramatic and witheringly funny as ever, and at times shatteringly sad -- begins in the spring of 1920, and everything now has a whiff of the modern. Daisy the kitchen maid rides a bike through the village, Mary and Matthew are planning...

When I asked Jamie Foxx and Kerry Washington if they had refused anything that director Quentin Tarantino asked them to do or say in Django Unchained -- you can imagine that these very smart African-American actors, playing slaves, might tell their white...

Life of Pi is not entirely about a boy and his tiger; but there is a lot about a boy and a tiger, and if you don't like adventure tales, this is not the film for you.

If technique were everything, the film -- whose 3-D wonders including a...

Daniel Craig looks craggier than ever in Skyfall, which is part of the film's sly, obvious-yet-effective theme. Without slowing down the intricate, explosive action that defines a Bond movie, director Sam Mendes and a sharper-than-usual screenplay create a story in which Bond...

On screen in The Paperboy and on stage at the New York Film Festival press conference afterwards, Nicole Kidman seemed -- and this is compliment though it may not sound like one -- less plastic than she has in the recent past. She...

With its expansive 70 mm images, The Master almost pounces on you as it announces its epic scope and ambition -- even though the impressive vistas of the sea don't have anything to do with the heart of the film. In its...

In the raucous club scene that opens Little White Lies, the actor playing the obnoxious, drug-snorting lech named Ludo looks so familiar you might find yourself thinking, "Who's that loud guy?" That guy is Jean Dujardin from The Artist, so at least in the U.S. loud is definitely going against...

Whatever David Cronenberg thought he was doing while making Cosmopolis, he could never have imagined the most relevent cultural nerve it would hit: the film has become the inadvertent cause of Robert Pattinson's first post-KStew publicity tour. (If you missed Pattinson's appearance with Jon Stewart, eating Ben & Jerry's as...

Neurosis hasn't seemed this adorably sane since Woody Allen. Clever, funny, expertly walking the line between arty and mainstream, Ruby Sparks is a lovable romantic comedy, with Paul Dano as a novelist who writes a dream girl, and Zoe Kazan -- Dano's real-life partner, who wrote the screenplay -- as...

Here is the great lesson of the newly unsealed Jacqueline Kennedy oral history tapes: Jackie said some snarky things. And her biting, often witty remarks have actually burnished and freshened up her image. Doesn't it make her seem more real, likable, shrewd and contemporary to have called Indira Gandhi "a...

When a murder victim is tossed onto a baseball diamond during a friendly Boston Police Dept. game, BFF's detective Jane Rizzoli and coroner Maura Isles go running. Not odd for a body to fall in front of them -- they are in a crime drama. But an unexpectedly witty twist...

Thank goodness I'm not a Huston. I was entranced by Love Child, Allegra Huston's irresistible memoir about life with her genius Dad -- John Huston, director of masterpieces from The Maltese Falcon to The Man Who Would Be King -- and adored big sister, Anjelica. But even if you've always...

Early in Confessions of a Shopaholic, Isla Fisher gazes into a store window at a glistening, diaphanous, emerald-green scarf, (the ultra-long kind that did Isadora Duncan in) and knows that if she buys it, it will change her life. We know that if she reaches for her credit card it...

Whew! Now we don't have to assume that every word coming out of the White House is a lie. But even in our new Obama age, human nature hasn't changed; every day we are surrounded by lying, cheating, manipulative foes and friends (kind-hearted white lies count). A smart way to...