Writer Walter Kirn tells a story about the way weapons of mass communication such as the Blackberry have made an impact on intimacy issues:

He's lying in bed with his girlfriend, post-whatever, and she takes out her Blackberry and starts checking her messages. Not to be left out, Kirn takes...

He's got a pair of IFP Spirit Award nominations under his belt -- and is guaranteed to be a player in the coming awards season.

But screenwriter Geoffrey Fletcher knows that not everyone is enamored of Precious, the film whose screenplay he adapted from the novel Push by Sapphire. Even...

The Adrienne Shelly story is so tragic that the temptation is to celebrate all the work she left unfinished, as her widower, Andy Ostroy, shepherds her unproduced scripts into production.

But as charming and bittersweet as her farewell film, Waitress, was, that movie felt complete: a script that Shelly had...

Brothers is the classic example of a movie that tries to be too many things and ends up not being much of anything except overwrought.

I've never seen the Danish film on which this new version is based, but there's a Hollywood heavy-handedness at play here, despite the presence of...

Everybody's Fine offers one of the few Robert De Niro roles in recent memory that doesn't equate acting with histrionics. De Niro is at the center of the film in one of the quietest performances of his career, yet one of the most moving -- the kind that ought to...

I've been touting Up in the Air as the year's best film since I saw it in Toronto in September -- and I still haven't seen anything that has changed my mind.

With this deft, witty, smart and soulful film, writer-director Jason Reitman establishes himself as one of the most...

It's a crisp fall day in Manhattan and Pedro Almodovar is explaining why his hotel room is all wrong for a movie scene, in terms of its color scheme.

"I'd never have such a unicolor setting," he says, gesturing to couch, carpet and walls - all in related shades of...

Disney has always set the standard for animation - so The Princess and the Frog arrives not just as a new animated feature, but as part of a lengthy heritage that goes all the way back to Snow White.

Still, this is Disney's first hand-drawn musical in five years,...

Rebecca Miller's The Private Lives of Pippa Lee is like a sigh of relief from a writer-director whose work has been sensitive/gloomy until now.

The film is also the first role that Robin Wright has had in ages that shows her considerable range as an actress. In particular, it allows...

I worry about the fate of The Road, John Hillcoat's film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's post-apocalyptic Pulitzer-winning novel.

It's a moving and upsetting film - quality work that deserves to be in the Oscar hunt, both for Hillcoat's work and for the shattering performance by its star, Viggo Mortensen.

But...

Richard Linklater's Me and Orson Welles is pure delight, a backstage story set in a romantic period built around a magically charismatic character.

It's also the movie that proves that Zac Efron is a real actor, not just a teen star with a solid singing voice and a dazzling smile....

It's referred to as "development hell" - that period between when a script is optioned and when it gets a green light - an endless series of notes, meetings and rewrites when the original script falls prey to the whims of all the chefs involved with creating this particular soufflé.

Like a well-crafted novel, Pedro Almodovar's "Broken Embraces" takes its time revealing its true intentions. It's an emotional time bomb, one packed with passion, color, romance and tragedy.

Set alternately in the present and the early 1990s, "Broken Embraces" ostensibly is about a blind screenwriter named Harry Caine (Lluis Homar)....

There's a tendency to always look askance at any film in which the story focuses on an African-American who is given a helping hand by a white person.

Not that there haven't been egregious examples of films in which the beneficent white person plays savior to the beleaguered black...

Carla Gugino is one of those actors whose fans believe she hasn't gotten the breaks she deserves.

She's given terrific performances in small film roles - but never got that big breakthrough part that made her a movie star. She was outstanding in a TV series (Karen Sisco) that never...

Because it's set in 206 A.D., John Woo's Red Cliff does not include a scene of two men pointing guns at each other's heads in a wild moment of mutually assured destruction.

The climax of Woo's gripping epic does feature that trademark image - men trapped in a potentially lethal...

Just when you thought it couldn't get any more stupid out there...

I read a story the other day touting a looming deal that would cast Dan Aykroyd as the voice of Yogi Bear in a hybrid live-action/computer-animated film.

The mind boggles until the head explodes.

This is so wrong...

For filmmaker Mary Mazzio, it's always been about beating the odds. And as she has shown numerous times in her life, it has less to do with talent than with desire and hustle.

"I was an entrepreneur in training and I didn't know it," Mazzio says, sipping tea in a...

There seem to be two kinds of documentaries about disadvantaged and troubled kids: the ones that look at the problem and make you feel angry - and the ones that examine people beating the odds and make you feel good.

Ten9Eight: Shoot for the Moon falls into the aspirational camp:...

Robert Altman's Nashville has had many imitators over the years: films that take an array of unrelated characters, then have them cross paths in the course of a day or a few days, hoping to strike sparks of friction or create harmonic resonance between people from different worlds as they...