Repo Men

Quite often at the theater, I sit morosely during the trailers, made to watch simultaneously the most marketable aspects of a coming attract...

How to Train Your Dragon

It is not enough to say that How to Train Your Dragon is the finest picture to roll out of Dreamworks Animation's studio, particularly ...

Made in U.S.A.

Starting with a dedication to Nicholas Ray and Samuel Fuller worded as if they'd actually reared Jean-Luc Godard through childhood, Made...

Pinocchio

Can there be any real challenger to Pinocchio 's status as the greatest animated film of all time? History has overemphasized Disney...

Steven Spielberg: Raiders of the Lost Ark

How Steven Spielberg and George Lucas ever got Raiders of the Lost Ark is as impressive a feat as the finished product. Made on the heels o...

Gangs of New York

Gangs of New York is the epic, self-destructive companion piece to Who Shot Liberty Valance . It posits that one need not have traveled out...

Bigger Than Life

 [Revised 8/15/2011] In my senior year of high school, I was sufficiently ahead in my English classes that I could take two electives broken...

Dark City

Alex Proyas' Dark City opens in spectacular fashion, zooming in the window of a hotel in a futuristic city that looks older than the se...

Céline and Julie Go Boating

The great problem with film criticism -- or at least the shortcomings of my own critical faculties -- is that the best films are often the h...