FILM REVIEWS

In the church of cinema, Scorsese is both a god and a high-priest, and he's brought both roles to bear on this magnificent, magical film. I don't know yet if I'll call Hugo the "best" film of the year—but that's an intellectual judgement, not an emotional one. In purely emotional terms, I doubt I'll see another film this decade that I love as much as Hugo.

Gorgeously filmed, and featuring amazing performances from Kirsten Dunst and Charlotte Gainsbourg, Melancholia is a powerful and effective work of art, and easily one of the best films of the year.

Featuring a ridiculously miscast Leonardo DiCaprio in the title role, a shallow, subtlety-deaf screenplay that wants to be Brokeback Bureau, and a clunking directorial style that feels like a color-blind Douglas Sirk helming an episode of Dragnet, J. Edgar is just laughably, appallingly bad.

There's nothing wrong with The Ides of March but its screenplay—and, unfortunately, the screenplay is everything.

Beautifully directed by Nicolas Winding Refn, with a fascinatingly impenetrable performance by Ryan Gosling at its center, Drive has the feel of a dark fairy tale, a minimalist fable so simple that it achieves the romance and ambiguity of myth.

A good director and a great cast can fool you for a while—and there are brief moments when Contagion rises above its mediocre script—but all the talent in the world can't rescue a film that ultimately has no heart, no insight, and no point.

True to its pulp roots, Conan the Barbarian has no pretensions of being anything more than an R-rated movie for pubescent boys who are supposed to be too young to get into R-rated movies. It is, indeed shit, but it's kind of fun shit.

By dropping its monsters down in a South London council estate, and by finding its unlikely heroes in a multi-racial group of teen-age delinquents, Attack the Block achieves something remarkable: it makes what could have been a formulaic, low-budget monster movie feel like a story we've never seen before.

Mr. Favreau, Mr. Spielberg: I'm sorry to say it, but the publicity for your movie more or less spoiled my enjoyment of your movie.

I went into my midnight showing of Captain America: The First Avenger feeling not just exhausted but over-saturated, and feeling that if I had to endure one more superhero origin story I was going to shove a radioactive spider up my butt and let it munch me into an early, cancer-riddled grave. But then I was shocked to realize it was—for the first hour or so at least—the best superhero movie of the summer.

It's a challenge to review Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2 on its own merits: not only because it is a continuation of the installment that began in Part 1, but because it is the valedictory lap for the most successful franchise in film history.

On this Thursday, just past midnight/I went to see Green Lantern, right?/Let those who'd do the same tonight/Beware my warning: Green Lantern's shite.

Submarine is a fine enough example of its genre, but it’s a story we’ve seen a hundred times before. And all this affected, self-obsessed, WASP-y teen angst is making me want to take a big old Hollywood flamethrower to the next disaffected kid who comes along with bicycle and a bowl-cut.

Super 8 is both another entry in, and a fabulous tribute to, the long, unbroken legacy of big summer movies. Director J.J. Abrams and producer Steven Spielberg have made a film that openly celebrates the sheer joy of filmmaking, and the way we never really grow out of the movies—and the movie makers—that we loved as children.

Rescuing the series from the diminishing returns of the previous movies, Vaughn breathes new life into the X-Men franchise by taking it back to its beginnings.

In a film about longing for the romance of the past, I find myself wishing I myself could be magically transported back to the long-lost days when Woody Allen had more on his mind than this kind of wispy, whimsical confection.

Okay, look—I'm not saying Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides is the worst movie I've ever seen: it isn't. What I am saying is this: don't see it. For the love of God, don't see it.

The subject of the new documentary Bill Cunningham New York hasn't even seen the film: he's far too humble, and far too busy. The rest of us can watch Bill Cunningham New York and wish our lives were a little more like his; he's having too much fun being Bill Cunningham.

With Judgment Day less than 24 hours away, I thought it was a good time to revisit Michael Tolkin's 1991 fundamentalist schlock-fest, The Rapture. And I'm so glad I did: among other things, I learned that the apocalypse will be foggy, that Mimi Rogers had very nice breasts, and that Jesus hates plaque.

Thor is a crushing mediocrity, a passable but forgettable entry in the Mighty Marvel Movie Franchise.

It’s hard to think of a film that better explores the question of what it would mean to truly live a Christian life than Of Gods and Men. Whether you consider yourself a believer or not—and, for the record, I do not—the result is a profoundly beautiful and powerfully gripping drama about faith, conviction, and quiet, humble courage.

The best that can be said of director Jason Winer's 2011 remake of Arthur is that it's harmless. And it is harmless—in the same way, for example, that necrophilia is harmless.

Everything Inception gets wrong, director Duncan Jones' Source Code gets right. It is undoubtedly a smaller picture, both less impressive and less anxious to impress, but for me it's the better for it.

In my inaugural movie review, I ask: do you hate your children? Do you want them to be stupid? Do you want them to suffer? If the answer to all three questions is "No," your kids probably deserve better than this sugary turd of a film.