Back in the '80s, when I was much too young and impressionable to know better, I was very taken with narratives featuring tragic-romantic leads: From John Irving's stuff (Garp, Owen Meany) to Stephen King's and David Cronenberg's The Dead Zone (with its haunted hero, John Smith) to -- especially --...

Relentlessly slick and undeniably entertaining, Nora Ephron's Julie & Julia tempts me to employ a recipe metaphor on its behalf -- but since that critical approach is likely to be dispiritingly common, I'll dodge the obvious and simply say that this project surprised me. Remember newspapers? Well, there are those...

In early 1978, a child wandered into a now-razed mall cinema somewhere in the Midwest, ponied up $3.50 at the box office, and discovered that he had arrived early for his intended screening of Mel Brooks' consciousness-altering Hitchcock spoof, High Anxiety. Naturally, the child peeked at the tail end of...

Somewhere in the vast sub-suburban bleakness of "America"-But-Actually-Canada, where it's always a gloomy 4:45 pm in the dead of winter, a sweet and curiously affluent WASP family just begging for horror and torture are about to adopt a charming little Russian girl named Esther, whom they will bring into their...

Matters of the heart may actively invite fierce overgeneralizations, and sometimes the blanket statements hold up well under scrutiny -- but nonetheless, I advise readers of this review to note that I am writing it as part of a calm catharsis of two decades of adult life which I would...

It's already made four hundred million worldwide."

"Yeah, but can it beat Transformers (2)?"

Please pardon the vulgarity, but these are the first words I heard spoken -- sadly, by teenagers -- upon emerging from a Sunday morning civilian screening of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Which was a...

June 2009 marks the 30th anniversary of the pioneering Secret Policeman's Ball series of benefit shows for Amnesty International. The anniversary is being saluted with a major film festival in Los Angeles and New York: June 11 - July 31. Huffington...

June 2009 marks the 30th anniversary of the pioneering Secret Policeman's Ball series of benefit shows for Amnesty International. The anniversary is being saluted with a major film festival in Los Angeles and New York: June 11 - July 31. Huffington...

June 2009 marks the 30th anniversary of the pioneering Secret Policeman's Ball series of benefit shows for Amnesty International. The anniversary is being saluted with a major film festival in Los Angeles and New York: June 11 - July 31. Huffington...

June 2009 marks the 30th anniversary of the pioneering Secret Policeman's Ball series of benefit shows for Amnesty International. The anniversary is being saluted with a major film festival in Los Angeles and New York: June 11 - July 31. Huffington...

"I saw The Secret Policeman's Ball and it became a part of me. It sowed a seed..." - Bono

"I think everyone is in for a...

JULIE TAYMOR
Photo: Jonathan Alcorn/Zuma/Corbis

In case you haven't noticed, Julie Taymor is one of those brilliant people. Yes, yes, The Lion King on Broadway and the films Titus and Frida -- these factors are known. And yet, as...

After the Mods & Rockers Film Festival 40th anniversary celebration of the Monterey Festival - there was a private party for the assembled Monterey veterans and film festival staff in the Mods & Rockers Clubhouse. Writer Gregory Weinkauf found himself at the...

The festival presented the first 35mm screening in Los Angeles in over 25 years of Otto Preminger's 1968 acid-comedy Skidoo. Gregory Weinkauf reprts on the film -- which has a reprise screening at the festival in Santa Monica on Sunday July 29....