Pauline Kael famously stated that great films are rarely perfect films. Do we ever wonder about the opposite? Are perfect films rarely great films? As the ultimate easy swallow, The Descendants, the latest release from Sideways writer/director Alexander Payne, has been practically pieced together by magical gold statuettes in the advanced laboratory of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. It’s been, why, since

One can’t help wondering about the name of the monstrous sphere, Melancholia. We are used to our planets bearing the names of, say, mythological gods—Pluto, Saturn, Neptune, Juno—not those of human moods or conditions. Could it be that Melancholia, blue in color as it happens, is in fact an illusion, a nightmare depiction of what deep depression is like? Could the deep, steady, rumbling sound be that of our shattered subconscious

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Another Happy Day is all but stolen by Ezra Miller, who, with this and We Need to Talk About Kevin, is on the verge of indie It Guy status. Elliott has enough issues for two or three characters: Above and beyond the usual teenage angst, misanthropy and self-destructiveness, his Tourette's has him constantly on the verge of an uncontrollable rage, and he spends half his time in the bathroom, either half-comatose from popping Grandpa's pain

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I don’t think I’ve seen anything lately quite like the ending of the 2011 Sundance Jury Prize winner Like Crazy. Spending time watching the rise and disintegration of a marriage, I wondered, is there really a moment when a romance ends? When the present becomes irretrievably the past? If so, then we’ve already passed it, and tied no cloth around a tree to mark where we left the main road. The choices these two young people make –

Mozart’s elder sister had French director René Féret wonder: what if Maria Anna Walburga Ignatia, affectionately called Nannerl, been as gifted a musician as her younger brother, Wolfgang Amadeus? A product of her time—second half of the eighteenth century—she grew up on music as did her entire family, goaded by the formidable Leopold Mozart. She played the harpsichord, the piano, and almost certainly the violin. She probably sang. Mozart’s letters