Here's the nicest thing I can say about Fast & Furious 6:

It's not in 3D.

That's apparently the only restraint that the makers of this high-end piece of cinema junk-food indulged in.

Otherwise, as exercises in preposterous mayhem go, Fast & Furious 6 is, well, preposterous. And...

Other documentarians may be more famous than Oscar-winner Alex Gibney, but there's no one working right now who afflicts the comfortable with more energy and pointedness than Gibney.

We Steal Secrets: The Story of Wikileaks is Gibney's second documentary in less than a year, after the upsetting and revealing Mea...

I was heartened to read that, on its opening weekend, The Great Gatsby did solid business, despite some unjustly vicious reviews.

I was even more uplifted when I read that, in placing a strong second to Iron Man 3, Gatsby only earned one-third of its box-office take from people who...

I often note how difficult it is to create a comedy that's not only smart and funny but also charming and surprising. But first-time director Craig Zisk, a TV veteran, has done that with The English Teacher, which opens in limited release today (5/17/13) and already on VOD.

Like a...

Having broken through as a filmmaker with the intriguing and moving The Freebie, actress Katie Aselton suffers the sophomore slump with her second film as a director, Black Rock.

Written by her husband, Mark Duplass, Black Rock is meant to be a Deliverance-style thriller, a girls-vs.-boys tale set on a...

South Korean cinema has exploded internationally in the past decade or so. I won't speculate about how South Korean society informs the consciousness of its filmmakers because, well, we probably only see a fraction of the output. It would be like basing your opinions of American culture on the Real...

The conventional wisdom about the Star Trek movies starring the cast of the original TV show was that the even-numbered films were the good ones and the odd-numbered ones kind of sucked.

That began to change when the Star Trek: The Next Generation movies kicked in; most of them were...

I've mostly been a fan of the films of Noah Baumbach but, with Frances Ha, he loses me.

Never a filmmaker for whom story seemed particularly important, Baumbach collaborated here with his star, Greta Gerwig, for what feels like an amorphous and fragmentary story of a delusional young woman who...

"It was fascinating and illuminating and exhausting," Sarah Polley says, sipping iced tea in a Manhattan restaurant. "I wanted to focus on all these voices telling the story in different ways. To me, what was interesting was not the story, but the way you tell it."

She's talking about Stories...

Acting is about being in the moment and discovering the character within it.

But before emotional scenes in What Maisie Knew, Julianne Moore would often warn the other actor in the scene, "Now I'm going to cry here -- but I'm not really sad, I'm just acting."

And her co-star,...

Having made his name with the kind of horror films that inspired the term "torture-porn," producer-writer Eli Roth tries to show that there are other tricks up his sleeve with Aftershock. Think of it as a 1970s' disaster movie, spiked with 21st-century horror effects. Irwin Allen meets Robert Rodriguez.

Roth...

Sarah Polley's Stories We Tell is one of the year's best films: funny, moving, thought-provoking -- and so personal that it strikes universal chords.

While critics often score indulgent filmmakers by referring to their efforts as "home movies," Polley has turned that insult on its head. She takes her actual...

You probably have to be in the right mood to appreciate Sightseers -- a mood that involves dark thoughts, perseverance and a grisly sense of humor.

If you ever imagine gruesome deaths befalling people who annoy you in the course of your day -- people you may not even know...

Apparently, it's already open season on Baz Luhrmann's version of The Great Gatsby, which blasts off in 3D on Friday before opening the Cannes Film Festival next week. I have a hunch the knives have been out since it was postponed from its 2012 release date.

But don't believe the...

Fashion entered my life in junior high school, when it suddenly became imperative that I own a Gant dress shirt, the kind with a loop on the back. These were deemed the ne plus ultra of cool -- and the only place you could buy them was the Northbriar Shop...

Xan Cassavetes didn't set out to make a vampire film. In fact, though her newest film is called Kiss of the Damned, opening today (5/3/13), she's still not convinced she has.

Think of it instead as an obsessive love story, some of whose characters happen to be vampires.

"To...

So is the third film the decider in a series? Two out of three good enough for immortality?

In the case of Iron Man Three (as the closing credits have it), I'd say it's probably too close to call. Jon Favreau's first two Iron Man films were a split decision,...

Love Is All You Need is an unexpectedly upbeat film from the chronically downbeat Susanne Bier -- if you can use upbeat to describe a romance between a cancer survivor and a still-grieving widower.

Labeling this film a romantic comedy is probably a mistake; romantic dramedy is more like it....

It seems startling to me that so few people recognize the name of actor Michael Shannon when they hear it.

Perhaps The Iceman will make the difference.

Shannon, after all, has an Oscar nomination under his belt (for Revolutionary Road). He has been the star of a handful of...

Adapted and extrapolated from Henry James' novel of the same name, What Maisie Knew is a film that puts the audience right in the title character's world -- and forces it to experience it the way she does.

In this case, Maisie is a seven-year-old girl (played by the dazzling...