Transformations rarely come as thick as the one made by Vanessa Hudgens for "Gimme Shelter." The sweet-cheeked kids-show chanteuse tosses on the hoodie from the bottom of the pile of dirty clothes. She becomes Apple, a teenage wretch escaping from her life with an abusive mom. This street child isn’t above cutting her hair in clumps or eating pizza out of a dumpster. That was not a skill learned on the set of High School Musical. "Gimme Shelter" starts out looking like "The Blind Side"

The shadows for “Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit” fall over the movie and the actors themselves. When did Kevin Costner become an old man? What happened to Keira Knightley’s rise to stardom? Why has a relaunch of Tom Clancy’s heroic CIA analyst fallen into the January dump period, especially when it, at least, is not a disaster? There’s certainly nothing shadowy about the chosen story for this intended reboot. This isn’t the first time

In "American Hustle"’s would-be signature moment con-man Christian Bale shows G-man Bradley Cooper a Rembrandt in a gallery. He explains that it’s really a fake. Who is the better artist, he asks, the original artist or the person who took the time and skill to fake it?

Well, I would say the artist. He is the one who perceived it. He is the one who conceived it. He is the one who summoned the inspiration.

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

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

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

The car porn chiller “Getaway” is a movie of wonder. I wondered about the way the film was actually made, the shooting sequence, the extravagant car flips and pile-ups, the monotone acting. Did Ethan Hawke actually shoot all of the gear-shifting shots? Or was that Ethan Hawke’s hand double? Did they shoot one gear shift and re-use that footage? Or is there a special gear shift for each scene so that each one has a different feel? And were Ethan Hawke and Disney queen

I dressed like that. In college more so than high-school. Black trench coat (but mine was brown). Black slacks. Doc Martens. I never owned that Sisters of Mercy T-shirt, but I did own the album with that cover.

That was Gary King’s wardrobe on the last day of high-school in 1990, the day he and four friends started (but didn’t finish) a legendary twelve-pub crawl in their English hometown. It’s still what he wears twenty-three years later as he rounds

If there were a subtitle to Joshua Oppenheimer's "The Act of Killing," it could be "Fun Loving War Criminals." A cadre of aging Indonesian gangsters relive their part in a pogrom against communists in the sixties.

In the political chaos of the time, the Indoneisan army staged a coup in order to pre-empt a suspected communist takeover of the government and saved Mel Gibson and Sigourney

In “The Conjuring” Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga take the roles of paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren, a Nick and Nora of supernatural troubleshooting. The real-life Warrens are best known in some circles as investigators at Amityville. “The Conjuring” comes from a lesser known incident earlier in their career, a 1971 investigation at a 300-year-old Rhode Island farmhouse. The Perrons--husband, wife, and five daughters