A photographer drives dusty desert roads, stopping occasionally to shoot crumbling ruins and barren landscapes — another example, one imagines right then, but not an unwelcome one, of the feature-length loneliness-and-desolation metaphors that sear achingly through contemporary Iranian film till you can feel the pain of an astoundingly creative industry cut off from the wider … more…

“Priests can’t deny their sexuality, gay or otherwise.” Whoa. And it’s a man of the cloth who utters this dangerous line. Double whoa. It’s only the future of the largest religious organization on the planet that filmmaker John Deery chose for his writing and directing debut, and the result is a film both astonishing in … more…

How’s this for a ‘hare-brained scheme’? You’re an upper-middle-class middle-aged man, still madly in love with your wife after decades together, and on the first Christmas after your now-grown daughter has flown the coop, you figure: Hey, maybe me and the little lady should skip the insanity of the holidays this year and treat ourselves to something special, like maybe a cruise of the islands.

I spent most of *Alexander* squirming, checking my watch, and occasionally busting out in derisive guffaws. Oliver Stone has perhaps finally gone round the bend: this is a disaster of a film, three hours of butt-numbing tedium punctuated by moments of hilarious high camp.

How many movies make you feel like a sophisticate just for having seen them? An evening out to see Federico Fellini’s masterwork — the new print beautifully shows off Otello Martelli’s silvery, creamy black-and-white cinematography — is just about as good for imparting a sense of jaded elegance as an impromptu trip to the Continent. … more…

At last, we have the answer to the question that has haunted humankind for the last twenty years: What would *Raiders of the Lost Ark* look like if Jerry Bruckheimer had gotten his grubby paws on it? And in retrospect, it seems we always really knew the answer, deep in our hearts: It comes as no surprise that the precisely calculated *National Treasure* is overflowing with endless chase sequences and stuff blowing up and acres of nonsense that no one even bothers to disguise, with a few Indiana Jones torches left lying around for the characters to pick up and use to cast a fiery golden light on the plot holes and the characters that are little more than loose concoctions of Hollywood cliches and the desperate reek of money-grubbing emanating from the screen.

This is one of those neither-here-nor-there movies, the kind that defy genre conventions and attempt to approximate the messiness of real life… the kind of movie we could use a lot more of, even though this one will probably disconcert more viewers than it enthralls. Graphically sexual, in spots, and cozily domestic throughout, this is … more…

Creative people get asked the question all the time: ‘Where do you get your ideas from?’ It’s a question that mystifies creative people, who know that if we aren’t a million ideas behind, we’re doing something wrong: the problem isn’t finding ideas, it’s in stopping the flow in order to concentrate on just a few of them. Inspiration is everywhere, in all the places we go and in all the people we meet… and I’ve never seen a film capture that sense of being immersed in one’s own imagination better than *Finding Neverland* does.

I’ve heard tell that there are some grownups who don’t get why other grownups might want to watch a cartoon. I guess those grownups have forgotten how good it feels when you’re braying like a hyena for 90 minutes straight. Maybe if we told them, I dunno, that nonstop laughter is good for the abs or something, they might see the value in it.