Anne Hathaway appearing in a musical doesn't surprise me. Her entire Oscar hosting gig felt like a four-hour audition for Glinda the Good Witch in the upcoming movie musical for "Wicked." But who knew she could be so devastatingly good as Fantine, a woman struggling through poverty in France's revolutionary days who winds up forced to sell her teeth, hair and self to support her young daughter Cosette. Hathaway is going to

“This is 40”, the“sorta” sequel to “Knocked up”, is “sorta”terrible and when I say sorta, I mean a lot. So many movies, TV shows, and even prior Judd Apatow films have tried to sitcomize the pitfalls of marriage to the point where it’s been done to death. Being that this was an Apatow flick, I was hoping he would have a fresh take, but this is without question his worse film and one of the worse of the year, too. Paul Rudd and Leslie play Pete

Any review of Mchael Haneke’s “Amour” should start by noting what a moving story it tells. Did I cry during “Amour”? Two-ply tissues. “Amour” gives a gentle but chilling view into the final months of a woman’s life, and the frustration of a husband who must care for his loved one as she slowly passes away. However I approach “Amour” with two minds. As a touching depiction of life struggling toward an end, “Amour” is a beautifully

Ken Burns's documentary “The Central Park 5” (it was co-directed with Sarah Burns and David McMahon) begins with the recounting of the rape of a jogger in the park during April of 1989, the trigger event of a woefully tragic story. Working with his daughter and son-in-law, Burns has created a nearly flawless film about the cracks in our criminal justice system, zeroing in on the “us vs. them” mentality that became

Better movies are coming in the next couple of weeks, is what I kept repeating to myself as I sat through “Deadfall," an incredibly average thriller about people with father issues. Eric Bana and Olivia Wilde play Addison and Liza, two siblings who forged a very deep bond with one another during their young years when they’re alcoholic father put them through hell. Now they’re casino robbers on the run in the blizzard-laden count-

“Killing them Softly” is an expression I never understood but I'll guess that if one needed to kill softly, Brad Pitt’s Jackie would be the right man for the job. “Softly,” writer-director Andrew Dominik’s adaptation of the George V. Higgins novel “Cogan’s Trade," (itself a follow-up to “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford") is the Weinstein Company contender for an Academy Award this year. It’s not going to

Benjamin Dickinson's "First Winter" could have been a long-overdue excoriation of certain latter-day urban hipsters, and how the fatuity of their forced earthiness and anti-establishment attitudes would be brutally exposed should they face actual danger and isolation from the modern world. Using the familiar shaky camerawork and penetrating close-ups that curiously characterize virtually all indie films, Dickinson follows a group of blank-

There was some hope for “Breaking Dawn Part 2." The end of Part 1 had Bella (Kristen Stewart) getting pregnant with what might be a demon offspring while becoming something of a demon herself when Edward (Robert Pattinson) turns her into a vamp. I expected Stephanie Meyers's so far-overblown book series to finally find some urgency but this may be the worse one yet, because we now know that it was all leading to bupkis, estab-

Last night I felt as if our sixteenth president leapt […]

Le fils de l'autre (original title)--Imagine a freak accident being enough to bring Israelis and Palestinians together and you’ll have the gist of what French filmmaker Lorraine Levy is going for here with “The Other Son.” It’s an intriguing concept about two eighteen year-olds, an Israeli named Joseph (Jules Sitruk) and a Palestinian named Yacine (Mehdi Dehbi), born during the Gulf War and mistakenly given to wrong families following the