Super 8: J.J. Abrams’s superfun, superloud catastrophe flick

Film Socialisme: Jean-Luc Godard’s take on Europe then and now

Meek’s Cutoff: fractured trust in 19th-century Oregon

The following review was provided by Village Voice Media critic J. Hoberman, who was in Cannes for the festival.The last day screening of Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s ruminative, challenging Once Upon a Time in Anatolia strengthened an exceptionally ambitious and coherent competition at this year’s Cannes Film Festival–although Terrence Malick’s The…

The Agony and the Ecstasy of Phil Spector: da doo ron ron

The Beaver: Mel Gibson can do crazy

Cannes 2011: dysfunction junction

Cave of Forgotten Dreams: Werner Herzog’s 3-D excursion

Of Gods and Men: Monks persevere despite terror attacks

Finding (fake?) love in Abbas Kiarostami’s Certified Copy

Cold Weather: Aaron Katz’s riff on the mystery of stories

Kaboom: Beautiful horndogs get blown

Inside Job, Charles Ferguson’s followup to his Iraq War gut-twister No End in Sight, is a documentary that inspires sickening ire — 20 minutes into this lucid yet stupefying account of the 2008 global economic meltdown, my vision was clouded by the steam wafting from my ears. Inside Job makes…

Only inertia will bring people to Michel Gondry’s 3-D spectacle, The Green Hornet. Opening amid persistent negative buzz in the mid-January dead zone, this long-germinating prospective franchise, based on a character that first saturated the nation’s radio waves in 1939, seems pretty much DOA — although in the absence of…

The late George Hickenlooper’s Casino Jack is an improbably blithe cautionary tale, recounting the rise and fall of D.C. super-lobbyist Jack Abramoff. “You’re either a big-leaguer or you’re a slave clawing your way onto the C train,” the avid antihero (Kevin Spacey) tells his mirrored reflection in the pre-credit sequence;…

White Material is a portrait of change and a thing of terrible beauty. The time is unspecified. The subject is the collapse of an unnamed West African state, and the protagonist, Maria, a French settler unflinchingly played by Isabelle Huppert, is the proprietress of a family-run coffee plantation. White Material…

Boldly reanimating the comic Western that secured John Wayne his Oscar 41 years ago, the Coen brothers’ True Grit is well-wrought, if overly talkative, and seriously ambitious, returning the Coens to the all-American sagebrush and gun smoke landscape that has best nourished their wise-guy sensibility. This perverse buddy tale, in…

A picnic for Anglophiles, not to mention a prospective Oscar bonanza, The King’s Speech is a well-wrought, enjoyably amusing inspirational drama that successfully humanizes, even as it pokes fun at, the House of Windsor. The story is a good one: shy, young prince helped by irascible wizard to break an…

The Fighter is based on the true story of Lowell, Massachusetts light welterweight champ “Irish” Micky Ward, but, starring Boston working-class hero Mark Wahlberg, it plays as a Rocky-fied fairy tale for our time: Consigned to Palookaville, a sweet, unassuming boxer with more heart than brains steps up — all…

Jeff Bridges is God and, as image-captured from the original 1982 Tron, he’s also the devil in Disney’s mega-million dollar reboot, Tron: Legacy. The notion of a tragically split persona might have been scripted to give the new movie a measure of emotional gravitas, but why bother with writing when…

Black Swan: Natalie Portman goes batshit in a tutu

Tamara Drewe and the comedy of going plastic in a rustic world