While watching "Unbroken," the World War II survival film directed by star-of-the-moment Angelina Jolie, one question stood out among the rest: How can such an extravagant, provocative personality turn in such a normal, even traditional film? Here is a woman who built her career on shock value. Where are the shocking moments in "Unbroken"? This isn't entirely a bad thing, as the classical, stately approach creates a

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

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.

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.

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

As a critic it’s important to remember that there have always been bad movies. While Godard was at his peak and Arthur Penn and Warren Beatty were making "Bonnie and Clyde," Hollywood was unrolling horrible Cold War spoofs and beach blanket movies. The bad fade. The good last. It gets really hard sometimes. I tried to keep that in mind while suffering through "Guardians of the Galaxy," the latest Marvel Comic books adaptation.

There are two types of British indie movies. Some are touched with deep or crazy ideas too creative for mainstream release. Others give middle-aged British stars something to do in between “Harry Potter” movies. Emma Thompson and Pierce Brosnan are the middle-age British stars of record in Jeff Hopkins’s romantic comedy, “The Love Punch.” They play a divorced English couple driven to both revenge

With two first-round picks in the 2012 NFL draft the Cleveland Browns were favorites to trade up to the number two overall pick and land the rights to Heisman trophy-winner Robert Griffin, III. They were outbid by the Washington Redskins, whom Griffin would lead to the playoffs. The Browns kept their picks and chose running back Trent Richardson and quarterback Brandon Weeden. Two short years later, neither