I’ve seen The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo twice, now, in both the Swedish and Hollywood version. English doesn’t improve it. Given that it has the same flaw--a glacial, hard-to-edit first chapter shocked to life by a gripping second--it appears to be a problem with the story, or at least how the enormously popular Stieg Larsson best-seller travels to the screen. I prefer the Swedish version, starring Noomi Rapace to David Fincher’s

The most deliciously scabrous skit on the mid-nineties HBO comedy series “Mr. Show” was “The Dewey Awards,” which skewered the sanctimonious trend of rewarding A-list Hollywood actors for their “brave” portrayals of the autistic, the mentally retarded, and other less fortunate types. Those rankled by the sight of Dustin Hoffman and Tom Hanks playing these parts, rather than real-life challenged actors, could gasp in private delight at this long-delayed

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Clint Eastwood’s J.Edgar really threw me for a loop. I went in expecting a thriller along the lines of DeNiro’s The Good Shepherd but with more heft, because Hoover was such an enormous figure. Instead I got an epic love story between Hoover and his #2, Clyde Tolson. Whereas a movie like Brokeback Mountain was able to craft an engaging film around their romance, one the filmmakers didn’t dance around, J. Edgar plods along at an excruciatingly

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

Swedish director Tomas Alfredson exploded onto the international scene in 2007 with his unsettling child vampire flick, ‘Let the Right One In.’ In that film, he took a rather implausible premise and turned it into one of the more unsettling horror films of recent memory. Pushing forward into the realm of the improbable, Alfredson unveils his surefooted adaptation of John Le Carre’s unfilmable novel “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” (the only other adaptation

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