It’s the perfect film for that most uncritically patriotic of holidays, the Fourth of July, all slo-mo stars-and-stripes in the warm breeze of apple-pie freedom and the golden light of soft-focus diversity. We’re the best! director Louis Schwartzberg cheers. There’s no denying that the United States is bursting with perfectly lovely and wonderful and funky … more…

‘This is one of those avant garde things,’ the elderly Cole Porter snorts amusedly as *De-Lovely* opens. He’s observing his own life and career unfolding before him, commenting from ‘offstage’ on the action. It’s the most unusual and delightful film-within-a-film structure I’ve ever seen, but this meta-flick is never so wrapped up in its own cleverness to forget to be heartrendingly romantic. As should be anything to do with Cole Porter and his music.

Call it the eternal loneliness of the superhero. Or a secret-identity crisis. In what must be quite the most tenderly tragic comic-book movie ever made, Our Hero contemplates chucking all that great power and great responsibility for a quiet, ‘normal’ life.

God help us if the “best” the FBI has to offer cannot distinguish between overprivileged, anorexic, skanky white society brats and their own strapping moronic black male colleagues in terrifying whiteface drag. Even worse: The close friends of the society brats fail to notice that they’ve been replaced by strapping moronic black FBI agents in … more…

The first time Michael Moore met George W. Bush — which is how Moore describes the moment when he introduced himself by shouting his name at Bush across a crowd — Bush smirks and shouts back: ‘Behave yourself!’

Where did this come from all of a sudden, organized humiliation, both physical and psychological, as American bloodsport? Cruelty is undoubtedly an inherent human quality, but how did we get to a point at which we, as a culture, celebrate it, revel in it? Far be it from me to suggest that crude and brutish ‘entertainment’ is a root cause of grinning grunts leading prisoners around on dog leashes — I’m of the school that movies and TV reflect the culture more than inspire it — but it hardly seems like satire to suggest that we’re on the verge of *Survivor: Guantanamo* or *Who Wants to Run Abu Ghraib?*

There’s a blustery charm to the gothy outcasts of writer/director Todd Stephens’s beautifully realized Gypsy 83, two unlikely best pals who cling to each other in the cultural wasteland of cool-deprived Sandusky, Ohio. Gypsy (Sara Rue: A Slipping-Down Life) is a 25-year-old wannabe singer with some genuine talent, if not quite the drive to pursue … more…