Marshall Fine

I've been a Howard Stern fan for most of his radio career. So I swallowed hard and set my DVR for America's Got Talent, to watch him in his foray to the network.

I've never watched any of what passes for contemporary talent shows among the network's reality offerings. I've...

If the same proportion of people in the United States saw The Avengers as the percentage of French citizens who have seen The Intouchables, the Marvel super-hero-fest would have grossed well over $1 billion domestically (instead of slightly less than half of that).

As it is, The Intouchables, opening in...

I will admit: I tend to have a bias against movies with the number "3" in the title. If there's ever a dead giveaway that all imagination has been sapped from a movie, it's that second sequel (as if the first sequel wasn't bad enough).

Sure, the filmmaker can...

I've got to hand it to Morgan Spurlock, a documentary maker who has enough curiosity -- and enough wherewithal -- to make the movies he wants to make, and lots of them. Mansome is his second this year (after his entertaining Comic-Con doc), a slight but entertaining piece that is...

Is there anything headier, happier and more confusing than first love? Of course not.

That sensation is captured perfectly in Wes Anderson's Moonrise Kingdom, as wonderfully odd and formal a film as Anderson has made. Even in Anderson's detail-oriented obsession with symmetry and control of his images, he manages...

The Intouchables, opening Friday (5/25/12) in limited release, offers the epitome of the breakout performance: Omar Sy, who won the Cesar, the French Oscar, for best actor for his performance in this film, defeating Jean Dujardin for The Artist. Sy was already a star in France -- but he'll come...

Lovely Molly is a direct descendant of The Blair Witch Project. Aside from the fact that it incorporates the same handheld, shaky-cam, faux-doc technique as that 1999 sensation, it was written and directed by Eduardo Sanchez, one of Blair Witch's co-directors/creators.

But this genre of horror film is played out...

Though billed as a Russian film noir, Elena skimps on the noir, and more's the pity.

Instead, it's a disciplined, controlled and ultimately disappointing drama of family tension and murder. The crime does not go unpunished, but the punishment seems mild to the point of nonexistence.

Nadezhda Markina plays...

Interesting the difference a few months can make.

When I saw Tanya Wexler's Hysteria last fall at the Toronto Film Festival, I enjoyed it for its perspective on how far we've come in terms of our attitudes toward women having control over their own bodies.

Eight months later, Hysteria, a...

Maiwenn Le Besco's Polisse is tough and compelling, a police drama with no real plot but, rather, a snapshot slice-of-life of a group of Paris cops coping with what may be the most demanding assignment on the force.

They are the members of the Child Protection Unit, charged with investigating...

Outrageous, offensive and alternately sophisticated and crude, The Dictator is also quite funny -- as well as being Sacha Baron Cohen's first comedy that is mostly scripted.

Did I say offensive? Put it this way: If you don't have a sense of humor about race, religion, ethnicity, sexuality and gender,...

I'm not sure who thought it would be a good idea to try to make a movie out of the self-help pregnancy guide, What to Expect When You're Expecting, but I have to assume that same person is currently hard at work on the video game. Which will undoubtedly be...

If Bobcat Goldthwait were a teenager today, "I'd be a kid making web content with a camera somewhere. If I was a young man, I might have bypassed the whole comedian-actor thing and just been a filmmaker."

He pauses, chuckles, then says, "Then I'd probably have spent my whole life...

Don't judge A Bag of Hammers by its first 15 minutes. The debut feature from writer-director Brian Crano may start out sounding like a goofy buddy comedy, but stick with it -- and it will surprise you. In a good way.

The two central characters are Alan (Jake Sandvig) and...

When Tim Burton and Johnny Depp decided, "Oh, wouldn't it be fun to make a movie out of the campy '60s TV show Dark Shadows," the correct response should have been the following three words: Wild Wild West.

Apparently no one had the stones to say that to Burton...

When it comes to actress Zooey Deschanel, I feel as though I'm suffering from post-kid-in-a-candy-store syndrome.

In other words, Deschanel is like some favorite treat, one that's a treat exactly because you only get it rarely and in small quantities. Then suddenly, you're given an unlimited quantity of that treat...

It's only May and I already have my favorite film of the year: Bobcat Goldthwait's God Bless America, as acidic and funny a movie as you're likely to see this or any other year. Already available on VOD, it opens in limited theatrical release Friday, May 11th.

An antidote to...

Don't trust the trailers for Anne Renton's The Perfect Family.

They make it look like an irreverent, iconoclastic satire, one that attacks hypocrisy among the pious -- like something from the Farrelly brothers or, perhaps, John Waters. Oh wait -- Waters already made that movie with Turner and called...

Here's the best thing I can say about The Avengers (and no, I will NOT refer to it as Marvel's The Avengers, because the branding is implicit):

It offers a couple of the biggest laughs in recent memory, including a slapstick gag worthy of Chuck Jones in his Looney...

An all-star comedy in the same vein as such crowd-pleasers as The Full Monty, Calendar Girls and other British charmers, John Madden's The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel is the kind of movie they seldom make anymore -- except in England. When they try to do it in America, you wind...