To some, the story of Christopher Johnson McCandless, the 24-year-old Emory University graduate who starved to death in the Alaskan wilderness in the spring of 1992, will never be anything more than a case of a spoiled bourgeois brat with half-cocked survivalist fantasies (and possible suicidal tendencies) who ran away…

In the new Neil Jordan movie, Jodie Foster plays New York talk radio DJ Erica Bain, who survives a vicious Central Park mugging and becomes an urban crusader devoted to cleaning up the city — with a Glock instead of a broom. Yes, The Brave One is that movie: the…

Is there a Razzie Award for worst casting? If so, reserve it early for this fourth, spectacularly lousy screen version of Jack Finney’s 1954 novella The Body Snatchers, which some bright light envisioned as the ideal starring vehicle for the Cold Mountain herself, Nicole Kidman, and for Daniel Craig, last…

The latest comic meteorite to hurtle forth from the galaxy of producer Judd Apatow, Superbad is about a couple of chronically unpopular best friends who, after four years stuck on the lowest rung of the high school social ladder, find themselves invited to a legitimately cool party. Goodbye, Friday nights…

Did John Waters sell out? Or did our ever-more-metrosexual age merely render him irrelevant? Certainly long before Hairspray took up residence on the Great White Way in 2002, Waters had abdicated his throne as America’s elder statesman of underground smut in favor of a more lucrative career as a neutered…

The magic has returned to the Harry Potter franchise — albeit magic of the old, black variety. The darkest and most threatening by far of the five Potter films, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is also the only series entry outside of the third, Alfonso Cuarón’s Harry…

“Anyone can cook, but only the fearless can be great.” So goes the personal mantra of the late celebrity chef Auguste Gusteau, whose disembodied spirit materializes — Jiminy Cricket-style — to guide the rodent hero of Brad Bird’s Ratatouille toward his goal of gastronomic excellence. He also seems to be…

Look up in the sky: It’s a bird! It’s a plane! No, it’s a giant silver eunuch on a radioactive surfboard! That’s more or less the gist of this mercifully brief sequel to 2005’s surprise hit about that other band of Marvel mutants, here joined by the eponymous big kahuna,…

There is a moment early on in “Dead Dogs and Gym Teachers,” the 14th episode of the brilliant but canceled television series Freaks and Geeks, in which gangly, bespectacled, picked-last-in-gym-class high school freshman Bill Haverchuck (Martin Starr) arrives home from school, makes himself a grilled cheese sandwich, and sits down…

Last weekend, as Jerry Bruckheimer’s pirates were once again storming the international box office, the Cannes Film Festival (May 16-27) bestowed its two top prizes on a gut-wrenching Romanian movie about backroom abortion and a plaintive Japanese drama about a sad old man who wants to dig his own grave…

This week’s generically titled studio suspense thriller, Fracture, has the good sense to begin where last week’s generically titled studio suspense thriller, Perfect Stranger, ended — with the solution to that tedious riddle: Whodunit? The answer this time is Anthony Hopkins as Ted Crawford, an aeronautical engineer whose pockets of…

There exists some debate about audience familiarity with the term “grindhouse,” and even a certain confusion about the origins of the word itself — whether it refers to the movies that comprised a gilded age of exploitation cinema, or to the all-night urban theaters in which they were regularly shown…

As Charlie Fineman, a New York dentist who lost his wife and three young daughters in one of the September 11 plane crashes, Adam Sandler sports a mass of bedraggled locks and walks with his head hung low, the sounds of the city drowned out by The Who or Bruce…

In the same week that sees Adam Sandler playing a grieving 9/11 widower in Reign over Me, another lone figure reeling from post-traumatic stress fills the central role in the new Antoine Fuqua-directed thriller, Shooter. Named Bob Lee Swagger and played with appropriately gruff machismo by Mark Wahlberg, he’s a…

When the editorial-cartoonist-turned-amateur-sleuth Robert Graysmith published Zodiac, his sprawling, meticulously researched account of the eponymous San Francisco serial killer, he wrote that the tale was “the most frightening story I know.” It was easy to understand why. Graysmith was writing in 1985, some 16 years after the Zodiac killer’s last…

PARK CITY, Utah –On the first Saturday of the 2007 Sundance Film Festival, I rolled out of bed and hustled up Main Street for the 8:30 screening of Tamara Jenkins’ The Savages, starring Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney as adult siblings caring for an irascible elderly parent. Only I…

One morning, Gary Walkow was suddenly transformed into a successful Hollywood filmmaker. Gone were the hat-in-hand searches for financing, the deferred salaries, the long shooting days with undermanned crews, and the months upon years spent touring the festival circuit while seeking a distribution deal. For a moment, he was taking…

PARK CITY, Utah — We all know about the cathartic power of blues music, but until the 2007 Sundance Film Festival, who knew that it could serve as a cure-all for everything from nymphomania to childhood sexual abuse? In Hustle & Flow director Craig Brewer’s Black Snake Moan, whose out-of-competition…

Though I’m sure it’s purely coincidental, the decision to release the Diane Keaton-Mandy Moore rom-com Because I Said So with the scent of this year’s Sundance Film Festival still fresh in the air provides us with an excellent opportunity to review the wayward career of the movie’s director, Michael Lehmann…

PARK CITY, Utah — On the first Saturday of the 2007 Sundance Film Festival, I rolled out of bed and hustled up Main Street for the 8:30 screening of Tamara Jenkins’ The Savages, starring Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney as adult siblings caring for an irascible elderly parent. Only…

Park City, Utah — On the first Saturday of the 2007 Sundance Film Festival, I rolled out of bed and hustled up Main Street for the 8:30 a.m. screening of Tamara Jenkins’s The Savages, starring Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney as adult siblings caring for an irascible elderly parent…

From the eardrum-shattering shout of “Attention!” that echoes over the opening logo, through to the strobe-lit krump dancing contest that follows, the early scenes of Stomp the Yard are so loud and incoherent that they feel like punishment. After an equally incomprehensible street brawl, director Sylvain White pauses long enough…