Movie Reviews & Stories A long time ago, a USC student named George transformed his love of Buck Rogers serials, pulp novels and Japanese cinema into the greatest space-opera film of all time. Since then, he’s redeco   More

Movie Reviews & Stories 1000101011101010101. That’s the opening pixel of Conan the Barbarian as it will appear to future audiences. Good ol’-fashioned film is dying, fast, as cheaper, digital projectors now control a   More

Movie Reviews & Stories Scheherazade, Tell Me a Story 63 Docking in Portland as the opening-night selection of the 22nd Annual Cascade Festival of African Films, this 2009 picture from Egypt contains a number of images    More

Movie Reviews & Stories Big Miracle58 About 15 minutes into the new inspirational family film Big Miracle, an insufferable Drew Barrymore exclaims, “But this is different—whales are in danger!” I rolled my eyes so ha   More

Movie Reviews & Stories Up to now, 3-D in film has been an enterprise largely extraneous to the character of film itself: moviedom’s version of the 10,000 love-fattened cherubs overwhelming the interior of a baroque    More

Movie Reviews & Stories The gender-bending Albert Nobbs offers a buy-one-get-one-free coupon of butch, with two central heroines masquerading as dudes. The titular Albert (Glenn Close) is an awkward, finicky little man   More

Movie Reviews & Stories From Billy Elliot to The Hours to The Reader, director Stephen Daldry has turned repressing your sexuality into something the upper class can feel sexy about. The people in his movies suffer the   More

Movie Reviews & Stories Are actors necessary? Many of cinema’s powerhouse directors, from Hitchcock to Kubrick, preferred to think of their performers as nonessential furnishings, but only Steven Soderbergh has tried   More

Movie Reviews & Stories Give The Iron Lady points for transparency: The film’s centerpiece is shots of Meryl Streep practicing her accent, the foundation of her biennial Oscar bid. She’s been Danish and Polish and    More

Movie Reviews & Stories Considering the standard result in Roman Polanski movies of yuppies breeding in fancy New York apartments—birthing the spawn of Satan in Rosemary’s Baby, that sort of thing—it’s a wonder l   More