If you're like most Christmas-celebrating Americans, this week finds you frantically searching for last-minute gifts. Maybe you procrastinated, your schedule was thrown off by the big east coast blizzard, someone slipped your mind, or you were guilted into it when someone you had deemed un-giftworthy unexpectedly got you something. Whatever...

A few weeks ago, a friend of mine from Canada was in town on business and stayed with me for the weekend. As we looked through a Los Angeles guidebook, he told me he wanted to make sure we stopped at a Target. Apparently there are no Targets in Canada,...

Watching Sarah Palin in a recent interview attempting to explain to Bill O'Reilly why she possesses the intelligence to be president, I got an eerie sense of deja vu. I'd heard this kind of answer mangling before. So I went on YouTube, found some video, and put this together.

So far, Hollywood's attempts at making movies about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been failures, usually critically but always financially.

There are a lot of potential reasons for this. While coverage of the wars has ebbed and flowed, it has never disappeared, so why would you pay...

If you survive the apocalypse -- whether it be nuclear, environmental, pestilent or zombie -- don't think you're out of the woods just yet. As we see in the new film the Road, directed by John Hillcoat and based on the Pulitzer prize-winning book by Cormac McCarthy, making it through...

What causes global poverty? Why do the countries of the northern hemisphere enjoy so much wealth while over a billion people in the southern hemisphere live in slums where one person (usually a child under 5) dies of starvation every 3.6 seconds? Many politicians and pundits would say that...

The Men Who Stare at Goats is dividing viewers and critics. Some thought it was funny and some didn't -- that's just a matter of taste. But it seems the main point of contention is the difference between what people thought the movie would be -- a dark, sometimes surreal...

Armed only with cheap suits, fake websites, a few props and nuts the size of Survivaballs, the Yes Men have become infamous for infiltrating corporate events pretending to be spokesmen for government agencies or some of the world's most powerful companies. Once inside, they either announce that the group they're...

If you've seen any of the ads (including posters/print) for Disney's A Christmas Carol (3D), you (and kids) would think that the film is a funny, slapsticky, action-filled Jim Carrey romp that makes dazzling use of the advances in performance-capture 3D/CG technology. And you would be wrong. Very, very wrong....

How do you get republicans, who take such pride in their talent for "supporting the troops" and "defending America", to vote against a defense bill in the midst of two wars? Make it a defense bill that defends gay people!

That's right -- 35 republican senators voted against the...

With the internet celebrating its 40th anniversary and increasingly making its way into our lives through sites like Facebook and Twitter, the timing is right for Ondi Timoner's excellent new documentary We Live in Public, which won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance for best doc of 2009. That...

The biopic pattern/trap in films is a hard one to avoid. Follow the typical biopic structure seen in Ray and Walk the Line (formative childhood incident, early struggle, meteoric rise, alcohol-/drug-/fame-/infidelity-induced fall, redemption) and you're accused of being formulaic. Attempt to reveal little-known, potentially darker aspects of a luminary's life...

It's been a while since a movie generated as much of a rift among critics as Spike Jonze's adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are, perhaps best illustrated by the glowing review by the New York Times' Manohla Dargis (who said the film "startles and charms and delights") while...

Here is the second part of my interview with Daniel Ellsberg, the true American hero who leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971, which later led to Nixon's resignation and the end of the Vietnam War several months after that. Ellsberg is the subject of a new documentary, The Most...

On November 4, 2008, the US did something vital and magnificent in front of the entire world. We rescued the most powerful nation in world history from a future defined by warmongering, ignorance, cruelty, homophobia, Christian fundamentalism, unfettered greed, environmental destruction, and a disregard for the rule of law. Yes,...

Like many people born after the Vietnam War, I had never heard of Daniel Ellsberg. That's not a justification or an excuse, just a statement of fact.

After asking a PR firm to send me films I might be interested in for ReThink Reviews, an advanced copy of the documentary...

Michael Moore's new documentary, Capitalism: A Love Story, opened this weekend with a staggering $240,000 box office in just four theaters in New York and Los Angeles, giving it the highest per-screen average of any film this year. As the recession rolls on powered by increasing unemployment, and...

I'll admit that I haven't understood the housing crisis as well as I could have. Maybe that's because the media and politicians kept talking about how crazily complex the "financial instruments" (or whatever you call them) were that caused the housing meltdown which continues to reverberate across the world economy....

Crystal Lee Sutton, whose struggle to unionize a North Carolina textile mill became the inspiration for the 1979 film Norma Rae, died last Friday at the age of 68 after a long battle with brain cancer. Sally Field won the Oscar for best actress for her performance portraying a...

What do the Pentagon, the Black Panthers, and the Irish Republican Army have in common? All three studied Gillo Pontecorvo's classic 1966 film The Battle of Algiers to learn how to fight -- or wage -- an insurgency. Watch my ReThink Review below: