• 2016 is starting to shape up as the year of the love letter to Hollywood’s Golden Age. We started the year with the Coen Brothers's "Hail Caesar!," a kidnapping comedy set in a fictional fifties studio with million-dollar mermaids, crooning cowboys and blacklisted commie screenwriters. Still to come is Damien Chazelle’s musical "La La Land" with Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone. Stuck in the middle is Woody Allen’s

  • Despite the latter half of its title, Seeking puts the charm back in "charming." The film accomplishes this by doing the impossible on two levels...firstly, by making a serious subject something to laugh at without falling into the always too familiar traps of over-the-top parody, satire or spoof. Secondly, the film takes the genre of romantic comedy and gives it edge without too much violence, shock or sadness. This thread-the-needle bal-

  • 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.