Among movies about race in America, how many great films have been made about slavery? We’ve seen gentle drivers ("Driving Miss Daisy"), sisterhoods of maids ("The Help") and pizza places going up in smoke for our sins ("Do the Right Thing"). Most of these films focus on the sixties or the modern day. Even Lincoln barely touches on slavery as more than legal theory.

This enormous gap

Never has there been a story of more woe than Carlo Carlei’s lukewarm adaptation of "Romeo and Juliet," that most eminent of romantic tragedies. The problem with this film adaptation is that it is about as romantic as a bad date and the acting performances are worthy of a pre-Glee high-school production.

Bringing the star-crossed lovers to life––or

To say that critics have not been kind to Shane Salerno’s “Salinger” is an understatement. They call it subjective to the point of hagiography, bloated and overlong, the ultimate intrusion in the life of an author who lived on the equivalent of a mountaintop in order to be left alone by the myriad fans enthralled for the last two generations by his single book, “The Catcher in the Rye.” They say the music is syrupy

Alfonso Cuaron’s space station disaster saga “Gravity” is an intellectually-soft video game, a SuperMario of space debris and a disappointment as a space-survival story.

A great deal of praise is being heaped on the 3-D outer space experience, labeled as immersive and hypnotic. Comparisons are being drawn to the upside-down, gravity-free experience

Adèle Exarchopoulos seems to have unlimited amounts of energy and charm. Will she follow Mélanie Laurent ("Inglourious Basterds")  and Léa Seydoux ("Mission Impossible") to Hollywood, too? Considering the fabulous triumph she experienced in May in Cannes, a career in the movies is hers, if she wants it. She appears in Abdellatif Kechiche's "La Vie D'Adele" ("Life of Adele") alongside with Léa Seydoux, an intense love story between two young girls which is sure to move even the most stone-cold moviegoer. Against all odds the film earned the Palme D'Or. What's striking about Exarchopoulos is the pout

“There is no way not to tell this right,” a cheerful Mason says to his co-workers Grace and Nate as he relates a story while on break outside the drab foster care residence where they work. The same could be said of "Short Term 12," a thoughtfully executed film that examines a range of emotions, from love and hope to despair and the pain of betrayal in an astonishingly moving ninety-six minutes.

Should we accept the common virtue of safety? Or, sometimes in the future when cars become self-regulated, will we--too stubborn to lose the thrill--reject the disappearance of the human element?

Pushing toward that thrill is at the axis of "Rush," Ron Howard’s superb film about Formula 1 racing of the seventies. At the end of the push, Peter Morgan’s

“Prisoners” is the most maddening kind of failure: an abrasively portentous thriller that, in spite of its copious flaws, manages to startle the audience a handful of times. Because director Denis Villeneuve regards screenwriter Aaron Guzikowski’s cut-and-dry kidnapping story as an ultra-serious treatise on torture, and because the superb cast (Hugh Jackman, Jake Gyllenhaal, Paul Dano, Terrence Howard, Maria

“Enough Said” will be fondly remembered as the late James Gandolfini’s final film, not to mention the one that most accurately depicted his real-life gentle giant nature. But it also marks the first starring/dramatic film role for TV comedy queen Julia Louis-Dreyfus (The New Adventures of Old Christine, HBO's Veep), who (a few too many face-crinkling tics aside) proves herself capable of carrying a film. And it’s a

The Persian story goes, when your heart is filled with sorrow, find a patience stone or syngué sabour that will listen as you talk to it until it can take no more and bursts into pieces, lifting that weight from your shoulders and leaving you free. This well-known legend has been written up any number of times, including by Iranian novelist Sadegh Chubak, and filmed at least once, in 1968. It is also the basis of the novel by Atiq Rahimi, Syngué sabour, that in 2008