Wild Target (review)

If you didn’t get enough of Rupert Grint and Bill Nighy in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows or just need a dose of goofy British-flavored comedy — offhand, self-deprecating, and coming in equal doses of light and black — don’t miss this.

The Next Three Days (review)

How do you manage child care while doing all the footwork required to plan your wife’s prison break? It sounds ridiculous, and it should be ridiculous up on the screen. But Russell Crowe makes it work in ways that far exceed any expectations we should honestly have for such a preposterous potboiler of a concept.

Megamind (review)

I like superhero stories that play with the tropes… and if such a story can take us to new places within a genre that seems like it must be totally played out by now, even better still. It turns out that Megamind is, in fact, just that kind of movie.

Prime Suspect: The Complete Collection (review)

If you’re not sure why it’s so awesome to see Helen Mirren unapologetically kicking ass in Red — and to see her doing so without getting grief for it from the guys — then perhaps you’ve never seen Prime Suspect, the British cop series she starred in through most of the past two decades.

Howl (review)

James Franco’s elucidation of Allen Ginsberg is soaring in its warmth and sincerity. The words are (mostly) the writer’s, but the vitality and the passion are all Franco’s: he makes the poet breathe for us today in a way that feels entirely modern and relevant.

Stone (review)

No, wait: lemme guess what we’re meant to take from this turgid drama of small lives and smaller ambitions. ‘Some people do bad things and go to prison, and some people do bad things and live their lives out in the wide world as if they’re in prison anyway’? ‘Crazy, quietly desperate men are sad and sympathetic, and crazy, aggressively desperate women are slutty objects of derision’?

Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (review)

It’s sort of adorable and sort of terrifying to look at Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps and see the ultimate 80s icon of sharky, sociopathic greed — Gordon Gekko — reduced to an object of quaint amusement, for both the characters onscreen and for us in the viewing audience.

Machete (review)

I can’t wait for the right-wing windbags to begin decrying Rodriguez and Machete — oh noes! he’s trying to ignite a class war!