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Dear San Francisco: It's not you, it's me.

And I know what you're thinking, I do. I've moved to L.A. after five years in San Francisco -- how can that...

Moving to L.A. from San Francisco threw off my movie viewing -- or, rather, temporarily reduced it from the ludicrous to the merely insane; I saw a few things during the process of relocating, but there were plenty of things I skipped. One of the films I missed was Stop-Loss,...

Recently, the winner of the 2007 Oscar for Best Picture, No Country for Old Men, came to DVD, and I've had the chances to re-watch it several times since I first saw it at Cannes in May. We've also recently marked the fifth anniversary of the beginning of...

The past two weeks have seen two different contests with little, and much, in common: The 80th Academy Awards and the not-so-super Tuesday primaries in Vermont, Ohio, Rhode Island and Texas. Both were sold with a fair degree of hype, both had surprises and both had definitive winners....

1) As a Glimpse into the Mindset of an Academy Voter

The dirty little secret of the Oscars is that while they're often derided and dismissed as the self-celebration of a liberal elite, they're actually more conservative than you might think. The average Academy voter is white, male, older...

I had already been thinking about violence in entertainment since I saw Funny Games at Sundance; Michael Haneke's English-language remake of his own 1997 film is a grim piece of moviemaking, and one designed to start arguments about why and how we watch violent films. And then the NIU...

Roger Ebert is not, in fact, up in Park City for the Sundance Film Festival right now. I am, screening films and working in the cold, and while there's plenty of old friends and new about -- every press screening at Sundance is like a high school...

If Dickens were a film critic, then late December every year would have seen his editor coming around saying words to the effect of "Charles, 'It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,' sure, but can you split that up, pad it out, give me some...