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

Nicolas Winding Refn's intent for his new film, shown in competition this morning, is difficult to discern. Is "Only God Forgives" a send-off to his previous film “Bronson” with a (sustained) nod at David Lynch and liner notes from Eastern philosophies? It would be distasteful to call a film a styling exercise. Filmmakers get our admiration because they invest more into filmmaking than you or I can ever imagine. Moviemaking

With “The Place Beyond the Pines” arriving in theaters with a bang last month, now may be a good time to remember “Blue Valentine,” Derek Cianfrance’s debut film of 2010 that critics called “astonishing” and audiences confirmed as such. It was and remains so on second viewing, this story of the unraveling of a marriage, for reasons all too familiar yet still unexplainable. What happens to people in a couple, how does a spouse go from

Since “Blue Valentine” Derek Cianfrance has paired up with Ryan Gosling again this time with the ambition of achieving "his" epic crime movie. Because who better to delve into this genre with than the hero of "Drive," currently enjoying leading-man status? The idea for “The place beyond the pines” was clever--the film, much less. Stilted by excessive determination Cianfrance delivers an imitative film that’s full of clichés and un-

Interesting bit of news out of the tweetosphere today: Bret […]

Don’t expect the Ides of March to overturn the established wisdom regarding politics, i.e., anyone entering that world do so at their own peril--this is still the dirtiest game in town. The optimistic hopey-changey Hollywood message died with “Mr. Smith goes to Washington.” Nowadays, disillusionment and a hardening of both heartstrings and arteries are bound to occur. But despite not delivering anything new, the film carries

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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.