Director Scott Cooper follows Crazy Heart with another actors’ showcase, starting with Christian Bale as a mill worker who tries to save his troubled younger brother (Casey Affleck) from a vicious meth kingpin (Woody Harrelson).

A middle-class teenager in suburban Tel Aviv does everything she can to ingratiate herself to her new classmates. In Johnathan Gurfinkel’s repetitive moral tale, “everything” invariably means sleeping with them.

Writer-director-actor Laura Colella cast her friends, all more or less playing themselves, in this pleasingly slight ensemble piece about multi-generational artists and aging hippies who share a Victorian house.

In Jessie McCormack’s contrived debut feature, Michelle Monaghan and Radha Mitchell play best friends whose relationship is strained over a surrogate parenting agreement.

Actor-turned-director Anna Condo makes a semi-promising feature debut with a fish-out-of-water Christmas tale that strands a family of Manhattan elites in a Pennsylvania B&B.

Director Scott Cooper follows Crazy Heart with another actors’ showcase, starting with Christian Bale as a mill worker who tries to save his troubled younger brother (Casey Affleck) from a vicious meth kingpin (Woody Harrelson).

Writer-director-actor Laura Colella cast her friends, all more or less playing themselves, in this pleasingly slight ensemble piece about multi-generational artists and aging hippies who share a Victorian house.

A middle-class teenager in suburban Tel Aviv does everything she can to ingratiate herself to her new classmates. In Johnathan Gurfinkel’s repetitive moral tale, “everything” invariably means sleeping with them.

In Jessie McCormack’s contrived debut feature, Michelle Monaghan and Radha Mitchell play best friends whose relationship is strained over a surrogate parenting agreement.

Jason Clarke’s sinister turn as a small-town cop who tries to take advantage of a lucrative car accident brings distinction to this otherwise forgettable Aussie potboiler.

In Jessie McCormack’s contrived debut feature, Michelle Monaghan and Radha Mitchell play best friends whose relationship is strained over a surrogate parenting agreement.

Kaya Scodelario plays a troubled girl who moves next door to a young woman (Jessica Biel) who resembles her late mother, but the maternal roles get far more confusing from there.

Attempting social commentary by way of third-rate Quentin Tarantino, Ben Drew’s London crime saga squanders some inventive narrative devices on a handful of overly familiar stories about drugs and violence.

Photographer/filmmaker Anton Corbijn helped define the image of bands like U2, Depeche Mode, and Nirvana, and he directed Control and The American. But he proves an elusive documentary subject.

Now restored for a new DVD/Blu-ray, F.W. Murnau’s silent vampire classic was nearly destroyed in a legal tussle, which would have deprived the world of Max Schreck’s creepy bloodsucker.

A police inspector murders his lover and deliberately leaves clues pointing to him as a perpetrator. Elio Petri’s provocative Best Foreign Language Film winner suggests the corruption within the system and the soul that explains his actions.

There’s an interesting movie to be made in the idea of a cyborg doppelgänger carrying out its creator’s dark fantasies, but this limp Gregory Hines action vehicle from 1991 isn’t that movie.

In spring 1962, the late French director Chris Marker (Sans Soleil, “La Jetée”) hit the streets of Paris and attempted to measure the populace’s pulse. He came away with more than anyone could have reasonably expected.

George Romero’s strange, beautiful action epic stars Ed Harris as a motorcycle jouster who practices courtly ideals in a traveling renaissance festival. It’s one of the director’s best films.

Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights came along well into the talkie era, but stuck to Silent Era conventions—to a point. It doesn’t ditch sound entirely, just uses it strategically.

Fast becoming a fixture of independent films, Anna Margaret Hollyman talks about White Reindeer, how she overcame her embarrassment about acting, and what it’s like to snort prop cocaine.

The choices film-critic circles and societies make may not greatly influence Oscar wins, but they’re never boring to follow.

Wondering what films you need to see before closing the book on 2013? We’ve got a two-part list for you. Part two covers films released between August and December.

From an influx of stylish Korean directors to Hollywood movies being made with an eye toward Chinese tastes, the influence of Asia on American films has never been stronger. We talk about how this complicated relationship is changing films on both sides of the Pacific.

The second installment of the blockbuster adaptation of Suzanne Collins’ YA novels is a major improvement on its predecessor, in ways both large and small. We talk over what worked, and what still needs improvement.

Alexander Payne’s latest, a black-and-white father-and-son drama stretched across the upper Midwest, has similarities with his past movies, but also transcends them in some ways. Three writers talk it out.

The Marx brothers’ future looked dim after the cooly received Duck Soup. Enter Irving Thalberg’s MGM and an attempt to class up the act. Exit much of the mirthful anarchy.

Nothing in Barry Levinson’s filmography suggested he would direct a found-footage horror film. And yet The Bay exists.

For his first and only English-language film, Truffaut took on Ray Bradbury’s science-fiction classic. Hated in its day, it’s the perfect example of why even the maligned films of a great director deserve investigation.

The choices film-critic circles and societies make may not greatly influence Oscar wins, but they’re never boring to follow.

True serial movies, the to-be-continued films that have been back in vogue since Peter Jackson’s Lord Of The Rings movies, usually wrap up one of two ways. The latest Hunger Games installment follows an earlier, more daring model.

In the Fast & Furious films, Paul Walker played a terrible cop—maybe the most terrible cop. But he played him well, bringing an invaluable quality to the series.

We’ve meticulously researched the prestige season’s most notable upcoming films, and scientifically assigned each of them an anticipation rating. Here are our summaries, and our thoughts on what to look forward to throughout December, and why.

We’ve meticulously researched the prestige season’s most notable upcoming films, and scientifically assigned each of them an anticipation rating. Here are our summaries, and our thoughts on what to look forward to throughout November, and why.

We’ve meticulously researched the prestige season’s most notable upcoming films, and scientifically assigned each of them an anticipation rating. Here are our summaries, and our thoughts on what to look forward to throughout October, and why.

In the middle of the 1980s slasher boom, Norman Bates checked back into the Bates Motel.

In 1987’s Dragnet, Dan Aykroyd co-wrote and starred alongside Tom Hanks in a revival of the Jack Webb cop show that’s more affectionate homage than send-up.

The prospect of the hirsute funnyman playing a child doomed to die young somehow wasn’t enough to keep audiences away from this treacly comedy-drama directed by Francis Ford Coppola.

Without seeing the film, graphic designer Sam Smith has created an unnerving poster for Jonathan Glazer’s science-fiction thriller.

Our monthly poster feature takes a different approach to presenting the purported final film of a master Japanese animator.

The official Blue Jasmine poster follows the tradition of other recent Woody Allen posters, but does little to suggest the tone or content of the film. Our monthly poster series offers an alternate take on the material.

Ronee Blakley talks about how she ended up in Robert Altman’s Nashville almost by accident, what that film meant to her, and how it changed the direction of her career as a singer, actor, and filmmaker.

The star of Alexander Payne’s follow-up to The Descendants has plenty to say about how he waited a decade for the film to get made, and what Payne has in common with Alfred Hitchcock and Elia Kazan.

The Palm D’Or-winning Blue Is The Warmest Color arrives in the U.S. surrounded by praise and controversy in almost equal measure. Director Abdellatif Kechiche talks about what drew him to the material, and what the challenges of filming it looked like from his perspective.

In the years between Animal House in 1978 and Vacation in 1983, National Lampoon had a chance to become a cinematic comedy force. Instead, it released two barely seen, barely watchable films that capture the comic institution at its worst.

We look back at what still works (Belushi, Belushi, Belushi) and what doesn’t hold up (racism and rape jokes), and how it all colors our perception of a film that influenced a generation of comedy.

Like its scruffy, silly subjects, the father of slobs-vs.-snobs comedy seeks no larger goal beyond making people laugh and pissing off The Man. In underachieving, it prevails.

The year’s Best Actor awards were plagued by miscategorization and last-minute rule changes, but that doesn’t detract from the impressive performances on display.

The Academy got it right when it awarded the 11-year-old actress a Best Supporting trophy in 1993—which is all the more extraordinary considering the many strong performances she went up against that year.

The Academy Awards often overlook comic performances. 1988 was an exception, but only up to a point: Kevin Kline got attention for A Fish Called Wanda, while an equally gifted peer got nothing for a breakout role.

A Netflix recommendation path leads from Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer’s dire-looking genre spoof The Starving Games to a 1970s-style film starring Jay Baruchel and Randy Quaid.

According to Netflix’s recommendation engine, only a few small steps separate Last Vegas from a bleak documentary on Hollywood’s sins, from the screenwriter of Cool As Ice.

Using the Jim Caviezel connection, Netflix’s recommendation engine takes users from Escape Plan’s musclebound action heroics to Hollywood On Fire, a hilariously earnest tribute to evangelical Hollywood Christians.

This week we relive our VHS dreams in a nostalgic remembrance of the video-store era, debate the merits of the increasingly popular Bechdel Test, and play a filthy new game.

This week, we’re all about the artificial: the artificial division of the film year into seasons, documentaries with artificial narrative framework, and onscreen characters dying artificially gruesome deaths.

We gear up for Halloween with talk of horror movies in general, The Shining in particular (with help from Room 237 director Rodney Ascher), and scary recommendations in theory.

This week’s podcast considers the value of “extratextual” information in filmgoing, the genesis and future of the neo-grindhouse revival, and some well-worn onscreen characters.

This week we relive our VHS dreams in a nostalgic remembrance of the video-store era, debate the merits of the increasingly popular Bechdel Test, and play a filthy new game.

This week, we’re all about the artificial: the artificial division of the film year into seasons, documentaries with artificial narrative framework, and onscreen characters dying artificially gruesome deaths.

We gear up for Halloween with talk of horror movies in general, The Shining in particular (with help from Room 237 director Rodney Ascher), and scary recommendations in theory.

This week’s podcast considers the value of “extratextual” information in filmgoing, the genesis and future of the neo-grindhouse revival, and some well-worn onscreen characters.