Dan Gilroy’s first feature film, “Night Crawler,” is a rare treat, a perfect thriller, a soufflé that rises as it should and keeps its superlatively fluffy texture from minute one to minute 117. But you stand warned, this film about a sleazy, nasty loser-drifter who has watched one too many TED talk about how to be wildly successful will not be as easy to digest. Jake Gyllenhaal, skinny, driven, with the smile a rattlesnake would have if it could

I should begin any review of Bennett Miller’s "Foxcatcher" by noting that DuPont products put dinner on my table. My father, an accountant by trade, later purchased a small business that sold DuPont products to auto body shops. That might make me the wrong person to review the film. Or it might make me the right person. You judge. The DuPont company has had a long and fascinating history, starting as an arms supplier, then evolving

The first thing to remember about “Interstellar” –Christopher Nolan’s fantastically-loopy apocalyptic father-daughter space saga is its nature as a scientific parable. Nolan, along with his brother and screenwriter Jonathan, are attuned to how scientific theory and discovery open new possibilities for story structure and mythic storytelling. In fact, the term “wormhole” in space comes from just such a scientific

It’s always a nice surprise when a film panned by critics turns out to be quite enjoyable. Such is Hossein Amini’s “The Two Faces of January,” both a crisp thriller based on a Patricia Highsmith novel and a period piece set in Athens and Crete in the sixties. The story is that of a wealthy American couple taking in the sights, people dull enough until we realize that Chester MacFarland (Viggo Mortensen) is a con artist trying to escape

A history lesson from a history teacher in Jason Reitman’s “Men, Women & Children:” the Sept. 11 attacks and Pearl Harbor are the only times that America has been attacked on home soil.

This must come as very good news to James Madison, who didn’t need to flee the White House before the British burned it two-hundred years ago, because apparently that didn’t happen.

Jennifer Kent’s Australian horror film “The Babadook” is bound to enthrall those who see it for, unlike in most contemporary horror films, that which terrorizes us is suggested rather than being blatantly represented on screen. “The Babadook” follows Samuel, a young boy with a grand imagination who becomes obsessed with a monster from one of his pop-up books The Babadook which he forces his mother into reading

Italian filmmakers created the genre of the Spaghetti Western. That makes “The Drop” an Amstel Eastern. The cast and crew of this New Jersey mob movie hail from the mean streets of Belgium, the land of waffles, chocolate and blonde beer (director Martin R. Roskam, cinematographer Nicolas Karakatsanis and co-star Matthias Schoenaerts). To fill other roles, they reached out to North Sea neighbors

Roger Donaldson’s film is bleaker, bloodier, more cynical. Martinis and casinos are replaced by hard liquor and strip clubs. There's a certain level of Bond deconstruction going on with CIA master agent Peter Devereaux – an isolated, joyless killer called out of retirement to save a witness to war crimes by a Russian politician. The world's best intelligence agencies are taking numbers to shoot bullets at them as they cross Belgrade, Serbia.

IMDB's one-sentence description of Pascale Ferran's new film is a nearly-apt one: "an American arrives in Paris, checks into a hotel, turns off his cell phone and starts his life anew. "French filmmaker Ferran, known for her "Lady Chatterley" and "Petits arrangements entre les morts" (2010) for which she won the Caméra D'Or in Cannes, took "Birdpeople" to Cannes again this year but earned some mixed reviews there.

When starlet Anne Baxter preyed on aging stage legend Bette Davis in “All About Eve,” did anyone figure that paradigm would eventually shift to middle school? Every two years we chop down the last teen star so that a new one can rise in the sunlight. You know Stewart and Lindsay and Fanning and Fanning, Knightley and Woodley and Ronan and Breslin. But do you recall, the greatest teen-actress of all? Would it be Chloe Grace Moretz