Featured Stories

Ray Greene on The Kids are All Right: "... a crowd-pleasing, feel-good comedy for an era in which the very definition of “family” is fluid and in flux."

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Pam Grady on Get Low: "A deft blend of drama, comedy, mystery, and a touch of romance, this self-financed indie that received the benediction of the Sundance Film Festival as one of its 'Premieres' selections will appeal strongly to a mature audience drawn to robust characters, dry wit, and great performances."

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Pam Grady on Catfish: "This is a film of warmth, humor, suspense and surprising grace, a crowd-pleaser for fans of personal docs, as well as anyone fascinated by the social and psychological ramifications of our increasingly virtual world, ensuring healthy box office numbers."

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Ray Greene on Blue Valentine: "Blue Valentine is the kind of grim, character-based movie that needs a strong performer to anchor it. Director Derek Cianfrance has been fortunate enough to land two: Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling."

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Ray Greene on The Tillman Story: "The power of first impressions is something every propagandist or salesperson knows about, and Tillman’s death, which was turned into a televised pageant where his family was presented with the Silver Star, made quite an impression indeed. The only problem: everything the army was telling the Tillmans was a lie.

Refuting that lie and trying to get to the bottom of what really happened is an ongoing process, one filmmaker Amir Bar-Lev's excellent new documentary The Tillman Story should advance measurably."

Read the full review here.

Ray Greene on The Runaways: "Music video director Floria Sigismondi’s The Runaways is far from a perfect movie, but there are moments when it comes about as close to catching the visceral kick of the pre-iPod rock experience as any film I’ve ever seen."

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Amy Nicholson on Hesher: "Joseph Gordon-Levitt dominates this slight, worth-a-watch dramedy about an anarchic headbanger who invades the home of a grieving widower, grandmother and son like a bear claiming a cave."

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Amy Nicholson on Nowhere Boy: "Sam Taylor Wood's biopic of 17 year old John Lennon opens with the first chord of 'A Hard's Days Night;—a one second blast of reverb that, like the film itself, is recognizable but stops just shy of infringement. This is the life story of the Beatles' most complicated genius (according to himself), remixed for added drama."

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Ray Greene on Winter's Bone: "A stunning journey through a world that’s as close as a plane ticket but as exotic and dangerous as the mountains of the Moon, Winter's Bone deserves to be the major commercial breakthrough for both director Debra Granik and Jennifer Lawrence, its luminous, moon-faced star."

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Ray Greene on HappyThankYouMorePlease: "At Sundance 2010, buzz began swirling almost immediately around the small pleasures of actor-turned-filmmaker Josh Radnor’s HappyThankYouMorePlease, and it’s easy to see why. The script is intermittently literate and frequently funny, the young cast (headed by Radnor) is highly appealing, and you can definitely imagine this movie finding a niche with a subset of the audience that turned (500) Days of Summer into a sleeper hit last year."

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Amy Nicholson on Splice: "What do you get when you cross a kangaroo, a dolphin and a human? Sexy horror, at least to director Vincenzo Natali's thriller about a pair of scientists and long-time lovers (Adrian Brody and Sarah Polley) who create the daughter they never wanted in an experiment in “multi-specied morphism” that their bosses hope will cure cancer. Despite an A-list star and a high-tech plot, the film itself feels like a hybrid of silly science tingler and moral philosophy with a straight-to-video sheen—which is likely where their larger profit margins lie."

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Ray Greene on Enter the Void: "French bad boy filmmaker Gaspar Noé gets in touch with his spiritual side with Enter the Void, a visually extravagant snorefest about the transmigration of a drug dealer’s soul which appliqués the extraordinary visual syntax of Noé’s arthouse hit Irreversible onto a thin, repetitive and surprisingly predictable saga of death, transcendence, reincarnation and the dead-eyed decadence Noé sees whenever he looks at the modern world."

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Ray Greene on Douchebag: "We hear every year about the unimaginable volume of movies submitted to the Sundance film festival, and every year, we look at some of the competition selections and just say “Huh?” Director Drake Doremus’ Douchebag—a black comedy lacking somewhat in both blackness and comedy—isn’t a bad film, exactly, but it is undistinguished, in the sense that its ideas and emotional payloads are both safe and small."

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