The feel-good La La Land, director Damien Chazelle's prohibitive awards favorite, is a movie of mystery. Can Emma Stone sing? (She can.) Can Ryan Gosling sing and dance? (As a singer, he makes an OK dancer.) The real and lasting question rising from its smoggy, sunny success, however, is this one: Why don’t they make more musicals? Every week a pigeon flies in from “The Death of Cinema”-land with a horror story about

Tate Taylor’s adaptation of Kathryn Stockett's The Help filled me with a wonder similar to that I felt watching—and relishing—Mad Men. There, the three-martini lunch, the 1960 men and women boozing and smoking themselves to death had me aghast. Same here. This was Jackson, Mississipi, fifty years ago? It’s beyond racism, unless racism means considering people so far below you that no one would blink at an African-American maid not being

I have a simple rule about the success of an onscreen romance. A good one feels like a movie is conspiring to keep the couple apart. A bad one feels like the movie is shoving them together against the movie’s will. Crazy, Stupid, Love shoves like a school lunch line on chocolate milk Friday. The marriage of Steve Carell and Julianne Moore is cemetery dead, probably in a way that didn’t play to the writers on the page. The worst marriages are those that don’t just die but drown the two people with them.

Directed by Tate Taylor. With Emma Stone, Viola Davis, Octavia […]

The “Easy A” might as well be for a class […]