Two extraordinary things happen in the otherwise stomach-turning teen romantic melodrama "The Last Song", the latest Nicholas Sparks book-to-screen adaptation. One of them is that Kristen Stewart with her excessive eyebrow-twitching is no longer the worst actress in Hollywood which can now belong to Miley Cyrus and her endless pouting....(more)

The Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan ranges from mysterious and tantalizing entertainments to polemics that are laborious and impenetrable, but with "Chloe" he has simply made the most entertaining film of his career. If sex, deception, paranoia and the forbidden are objects of cinematic interest, then here's a movie that is good enough to have come out in the Fall instead of in Spring....(more)

The unstable region of Baghdad following March 19, 2003 is the subject of "Green Zone," the new Iraq military drama which has an action movie pulse and the presence of stalwart Matt Damon, playing Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller who is a man of sweat and non-stopping motion. Following the initial military strikes of Iraq of the invasion date, Miller’s team is unable to find any weapons of mass destruction on mission searches....(more)

The discordant assembly of images in "Shutter Island" are haunting and distressing. At first sight you believe that the film will take place entirely on an island that lodges the criminally insane, circa 1954....(more)

"Greenberg" is a movie about repellant people that just so happens to be fascinating, but only if you are into movies about extreme head cases. “I am really trying to do nothing for awhile,” Ben Stiller says, “I am doing nothing deliberately....(more)

The road, one must assume, has got to be a great and exciting place for a musician. But when you’re 57 and travelling on the road, and alone… well it is just that....(more)

The reason why "The Lovely Bones" as a film connects emotionally with you is because of actress Saoirse Ronan as young teen Susie Salmon. And this occurs in a film studded with other well-known actors such as Mark Wahlberg, Rachel Weisz, Susan Sarandon and Stanley Tucci who himself does his first non-clichéd performance in at least a decade ....(more)

"Up in the Air" is another winner for George Clooney, the consummate movie star who brings his usual top-flight brand of intelligence to every project he chooses. Clooney stars as Ryan Bingham, a downsizing specialist that corporations hire to conduct clean, preventive-retaliation layoffs....(more)

"Brothers" strains for an accessible way to teach the audience something about PTSD, that disorder that plagues soldiers coming home from Iraq. The main crux of the movie is a carefully positioned moral crisis....(more)