Django Unchained is a nasty, brutish piece of work.

God knows what goes on in Quentin Tarantino's mind these days, but whatever ravings that too much success, too early, created it's a pity that there seems no muse he can turn to for editing. Inglorious Basterds was nasty and...

It's Veterans Day.

In The Great War and Modern Memory Paul Fussell, a combat veteran of WWII, reviewed literature and art created by the first world war and wrote of how the shock of millions being killed by high explosives and machine gun bullets affected how we think about...

@aiww is the Twitter handle of Ai Weiwei, an extraordinary Chinese artist/activist. Through it he has become an international figure and, with the help of other forms of social media, he has painted a more complex portrait of China than the one trumpeted as an example for America by some...

It's been a dry spell movie wise lately, punctuated with god-awful experiments in recherché des movies perdu: Ben-Hur, proving that even a re-mastering in HD, with a state of the art sound system, watched from leather seats in the Evanston Cineplex Theater 1, can't hide its late fifties treacle earnestness;...

There's cultural self-loathing at the heart of Tomas Alfredson's Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. A tearing at the fabric of Western culture and values based on historical illiteracy and ideological hipness. You know, like typical network news anchors, showing their chops on the au courant issues of the day. Which was...

A few weeks ago, driving north on I-55 at night, the car buffeted by a gale sweeping down from Canada, I searched for something to listen to on the radio.

FM stations playing automated hits from the '90s or country songs about trains and pain, over to AM, and...

There is only one adult in the room in The Ides of March: Philip Seymour Hoffman as the campaign manager for a candidate in the Democratic Primary for president. The rest is sort of an MSNBC/Jersey Shore political cartoon. George Clooney's ego trip of superficial insights into politics from a...

If I could figure out how to mass tweet the world's population I would tweet: go see The Guard.

It's been a while since I have enjoyed a movie so. I could reach for a comparison that would be too too and write "I haven't enjoyed a movie as much...

I wonder what the director of Cowboys and Aliens has against Daniel Craig's forehead, or, his eyebrows? But, then again, I wonder what the director has against coherence, soap, Westerns, American movies, Apache Indians, aliens, or Vice President Biden?

We all know and acknowledge that Joe Biden is the...

This is an absurdly melodramatic, improbable, romantic, guilty pleasure of a movie. Complete with corny music, more throbbing of propellers whirling on airplanes than any film since Casablanca and with two of the most fecund female characters since the Catholic League's Sex Education tapes warning against the dangers of premarital...

I saw 13 Assassins two weeks ago in London. It's playing at the Music Box.

If you have ever faked grunting laconic Japanese phrases while sipping sake at a sushi bar, you must see this movie. If you've ever imagined the feel of a Hattori Hanzo blade in your...

I went to see Atlas Shrugged with a shrug and little enthusiasm.

I remembered The Fountainhead vaguely. Mostly I remembered the dense prose, and a sense of what...turgidity, if that is a word? I was prepared to walk out on the slightest pretext; there were a number of other...

I just saw Manhattan again at the Music Box Theater in Chicago for the first time in twenty years.

It was magnificent.

Not as much for the story, which is a little creepy at the fringes: a 17-year-old girl having an affair with a 42-year-old man, but for how the...

Thank goodness we now have a truer grit.

Courtesy of the incredibly talented Coen brothers. Put them on a deserted island with an iPhone and a palm tree and they'd be able to use the video feature to make a South Beach-ian equivalent of Citizen Kane in a week.

As the father of a ballerina I wanted to see Black Swan again with her ballet teacher of many years.

The first time, seeing it by myself, I made mental notes of what I noticed: a bit of Repulsion, Adrian Lyne-style over the top sexuality, the cold white light of...

Shortly before the pat down controversy hit the nether regions of America, I flew to Florida on a 7am flight from O'Hare. Not a particularly busy time of day, one would think, the 'security' line did not seem too long and I had plenty of time before my flight. Or...

There is nothing more satisfying on Earth than eating a great hamburger. With terrific fries. Oh, and, a chocolate shake. My stomach twitches as I write these words and my mind does a quick Google of all the great burgers I have ever eaten. The Kobe beef burger at the...

Hereafter is a curious movie. It unfolds languorously, sometimes a bit too slowly, with disparate threads that don't begin to become whole cloth until the final thirty minutes. The opening is stunning, a CGI perfect rendering of the tsunami six years ago. Redoing amateur video into a movie reality. Expanding...

My children went to public school. K-12. It was a conscious choice but an oft times torturous experience. Endured for the most part, defined not by educational joy but by butting up against how the schools were run. Listening to other parent's amazement that we would even try to stay...

On hot summer's days I find myself popping into bookstores with more frequency than usual. Wandering the fiction section checking on 'must' titles if said bookstore is to be considered a proper bookstore.

It used to be whether a store carried Tom McGuane, and if so, did they have 92...