my week at the movies: ‘2012,’ ‘Women in Trouble,’ ‘The Strip,’ ‘A Single Man,’ ‘The Missing Person,’ ‘Nine,’ ‘Everybody’s Fine,’ ‘Serious Moonlight’

Woo-hoo! It’s the end of the world — again — as Roland Emmerich knows it, and I feel fine. Oh, there can be no question that this is crap, but will 2012 (opens in the U.S. and the U.K. on November 13) be glorious crap? I think it might be. I hope it might be. … more…

dream cast: hypothetical ‘Midnight Run’ remake

I’ve been convinced to give Dream Cast another try. (Thank my brother Ken, who posts comments here sometimes as “Ken,” if you’re happy to see this feature return.) This week: Midnight Run, the 1988 action buddy comedy starring Robert DeNiro as a bounty hunter and Charles Grodin as the mob accountant on the run he’s … more…

5 reasons I’m psyched for ‘Righteous Kill’

All this week! 5 movies I’m psyched for in September, and 5 reasons why. No. 2: Righteous Kill [opens wide September 12]. 1. Pacino! DeNiro! They’re cops! 2. In the trailer, DeNiro suggests the scumbag they’re trying to find is a “cop serial killer.” Which means we’re gonna spend the whole movie wondering whether Al … more…

The Departed movie review: mean streets of Boston

This is the smartest kind of spectacular that an international remake can be: it picks up the clever threads of story from its source material and weaves them into another world in such a way that it’s hard to see how they didn’t spring from that world in the first place.