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-

It was quite a while ago when Sam Raimi signed off on “Evil Dead,” a fun and uninhibited film that inspired many more and earned its author his reputation. Today, after the mid-air explosion of his Spiderman franchise Raimi turns his creative powers to mythology again with “Oz the great and powerful,” which was released in theaters earlier this month. And at the same time he sacrifices himself on the altar of the big-studio God

When early in the forties a young Greek director called Elias Kazantzoglou showed up at a major Hollywood studio, the studio head (one imagines him sending cigar smoke the way of the hopeful visitor), advised him on a name change as a first step. “How about Cézanne?” the studio head asked. The director who would go down in film history as Elia Kazan demurred. “There already is a Cézanne,” he said. The studio head

Augusto Pinochet, the benevolent-looking Chilean general who overthrew Allende in 1973—putting an end to a long spell of democracy--and oversaw seventeen years of terror, responsible for thousands dead and tens of thousands arrested, tortured and “disappeared” died in his bed (though under house arrest) in 2006. Wrangling over extradition procedures while he was holed up in London before being returned to Santiago didn’t give

After Luciano, the main character in Matteo Garrone’s new film “Reality” (out March 15th) gets the call from a T.V. studio telling him he’s made the first cut in a casting call for the reality T.V. show “Grande Fratello” (“Big Brother”), he gradually slides into full-blown paranoid megalomania. Watching him wait anxiously for the next round of callbacks is comical at first, until his affliction threatens to take him and his family down. It’s

The story of four college students on spring break (played by Selena Gomez, Vanessa Hudgens, Ashley Benson and Rachel Korine) is inevitably going to spin out of control—agreed—that’ s what the movie’s poster tells us, what the trailer confirmed, and what the dozens of similar previous films have told us before. But let’s not sweat the small stuff. What’s interesting is how effective “Breakers” is cinematically: a great, awesome thrill ride. Watch out, however, because “Breakers” could prove to be yet another of Hollywood’s

I should be describing “The Incredible Burt Wonderstone” to let you know the positives and negatives of the latest Steve Carell mass-market comedy. But watching it, all I could wonder was, whatever happened to Steve Buscemi and the Coen Brothers? At one time he was arguably the foremost actor associated with the reticent Minnesota siblings, playing roles in all five of their features in the nineties. Then it suddenly stopped. Why? Obviously there wouldn’t appear to be a rift, a falling out, as he starred in their segment of “Paris, Je t’aime.” They just suddenly quit. Was it money? A desire to try new