With a mid-week Valentine’s Day, anything goes for this weekend. If you delayed your celebrations, “This Means War” offers your romantic action comedy and features a reliable vet and two strapping up-and-comers. If you’re so over love, I might suggest “Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance,” perhaps the very antithesis to the notion. For kids and […]

Since the Golden Age of comic books, folks have been imagining what it would be like if ordinary people came across extraordinary power. But not until 2012 with “Chronicle” has anyone truly attempted to capture this notion with a sense of realism. Josh Trank and Max Landis have done just that with their low-budget found-footage […]

My first year of predictions, I could find all these shorts on YouTube, but that hasn’t been the case the last two years. As if I wasn’t taking enough of a shot in the dark already. Much of this was done through reading reviews and watching trailers.

Although both categories have to do with music, audience favor in these two Oscar categories are going in opposite directions. With more and more noteworthy musicians, artists and composers trying their hand at film scores, Best Score is becoming a category of intrigue, whereas Academy rules have completely butchered the Best Original Song category over […]

Coming-of-age stories come in all forms, though one would expect a New York City drug dealer at the height of hip-hop in the mid ’90s to have already experienced a loss of innocence. For Luke Shapiro (Josh Peck), however, dealing pot is just a summer job, and for all his street cred, he’s a lonely […]

They say “time is money,” and so it seems filmmaker Andrew Niccol took them too seriously. “In Time” imagines a dystopia in which humans have been genetically modified to stop aging at 25 and at that point receive a year to live as indicated by timers on their forearms. The only way they can prolong […]

If you have yet to take notice, 2012 has gotten off to a very successful start in both box-office terms and with regards to critical acclaim. This year films made $115 million over Super Bowl weekend. That compares to $87 million last year. Each week’s winner has also brought in at or just under $20 […]

My final technical predictions come in the Best Cinematography and Best Editing categories. The people whose names are recognized alongside these categories are pivotal in the filmmaking process. Most filmmakers work exclusively with one cinematographer or “director of photography” their entire careers. When a film turns out visually just as the director sees it, it’s […]

Few of us can truly grasp the economic fundamentals of the 2008 stock market crash—how it happened, why it happened. Most of what we understand are the after effects, the human consequences. Rookie filmmaker J.C. Chandor’s “Margin Call” attempts to merge those two understandings: the economics and the executive-level decision-making with the real-life impact and […]

Stop number two on my 2012 Oscar breakdown involves the more old-school technical categories, the stuff that can’t be done entirely by computer. As you might imagine, these categories tend to be a parade of period pieces with some musicals thrown in. In fact, the final “Harry Potter” film looks to be the only exception […]

Super Bowl weekend tends to be among the worst of the year for the box office, second only to the weekend after Thanksgiving. Yet this year the options are somewhat interesting and shockingly, all three have greater than 50% on Rotten Tomatoes. That’s good news if you’re Daniel Radcliffe, trying out your first film outside […]

So it begins—my third go-around dissecting every category at the Academy Awards in a three-week span. This year, the 84th Academy Awards take place on Feb. 26, three days before we leap. Fittingly, I am experiencing dejá vù all over again, because I began this quest for the 2011 Oscars exactly one year ago today—Groundhog Day. […]