Grief is a process. Psychology books and personal experience will tell you that. Perhaps not all of us experience someone being ripped from our lives in an instant, but the process is always the same. Why then, is it so challenging to watch 9-year-old Oskar (Thomas Horn), whose father (Tom Hanks) dies in the 9/11 [...]

The two most lovable stoners in movie history return in “A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas,” which somehow continues the series’ impressive balancing act of clever humor, crude jokes, stoner gags and heart.

So often the most powerful card in a brooding character study ends up the one never played. The mystery lying behind the on-screen display of social perversion, which in the case of “Martha Marcy May Marlene” comes as a manipulative cult, can drive intense interest just through sheer curiosity as to what possible force in [...]

Timely and familiar: these are the two qualities “Tower Heist” has going for it. Heist films have a reputation for good fun, and when said heist is pulled off by average or incompetent folks like these, all the better, as the characters become even easier to like. Add that they’re stealing from a millionaire who [...]

Animated sequels have yet to disprove that timeless adage about movie sequels, but they’re giving it a real go. DreamWorks Animation hasn’t always gotten the formula right (the “Shrek” movies got worse and worse), but even “Madagascar 2: Escape 2 Africa” had entertainment to offer. “Kung Fu Panda 2” marks the studio’s third try at [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Terrence Malick can’t count himself among the most popular directors working today, but he can certainly count himself among the most respected. His work tends to follow suit, and “The Tree of Life” is no exception. This meditation on life, death, God and the origin of the universe can be described as nothing short of [...]

  Global pandemics make for captivating science-fiction fodder — especially when the infected turn into raging zombies — but let’s say it was a tad more realistic. Let’s say that H1N1 had been as bad as we were prepared for and people were dying left and right. “Contagion” imagines that scenario through the extensive research [...]

Actor-turned-director Thomas McCarthy came off as a natural in his first two features as a director: 2003’s “The Station Agent” and 2007’s “The Visitor.” That put a fat old earmark on latest effort “Win Win.” All three films demonstrate an understanding of human motivation and how more often than not, things do not turn out [...]

Paul Rudd gets a lot of love from moviegoers, just not enough love. It’s not a wayward assessment to say that other than (arguably) Steve Carell, Rudd is the best actor doing comedy right now, in the sense that he could do so much, but he sticks to the joyful life of comedy. Thankfully he’s [...]

Our ultimate expectations of a romance film are hypocritical. On one hand, we expect a grounded film: real people in real relationships with real feelings doing not necessarily sane but at least rational things in the name of love. On the other hand, we relish in fairytale depictions of love and the idea that true [...]

She might have been a rom-com darling for most of her career, but there’s no mistaking now that Cameron Diaz is a natural bad girl. Sure, part of it might have to do with survival of the fittest; raunchy R-rated comedies are the new cool kid in class and those who can’t play that game [...]

The Pixar library stands as modern animation’s most impressive by far, partly due to both the studio and Disney’s belief that sequels should only be made with the right artistic reasons in mind, namely a good story. That’s why, to date, we have just “Toy Story 2,” “Toy Story 3″ and … “Cars 2″ … [...]

To use a completely irrelevant but title-appropriate expression, when it comes to comedy, women tend to be the bridesmaids and never the bride. Prior to “Bridesmaids,” the only mainstream comedy driven by females that I can recall (at least in the Judd Apatow era) is Tina Fey’s “Baby Mama” back in 2008. Comedies preceded by [...]