Email Author Stephanie Zacharek
2013 Stories by Stephanie Zacharek
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Gravity Is a Thrilling 3-D Breakthrough
published October 3, 2013
Some movies are so tense and deeply affecting that they shave years off your life as you're watching, only to give back that lost time, and... More >>
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Don Jon Review: Joseph Gordon-Levitt's Impressive Writing-Directing Debut Examines Porn Addiction
published September 26, 2013
To paraphrase The Bee Gees, Joseph Gordon-Levitt should be dancing. He's already done it in (500) Days of Summer, where he led an... More >>
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Rush Is Something Rare: An Action Movie for Grown-Ups
published September 19, 2013
It's 1976, a year when all the groovy girls are traipsing around in tiny suede skirts and all the cool guys have Badfinger hair. One of those... More >>
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Venice Update: Kelly Reichardt's Night Moves, James Franco's Child of God, and More
published September 5, 2013
In 1953, the Venice Film Festival jury didn't award its top prize, the Golden Lion. Instead, it made the highly unorthodox decision to award... More >>
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Venice Update: The Wordless Beauty and Brutality of Kim Ki-duk's Moebius and Scarlett Johansson in Jonathan Glazer's Under the Skin
published September 5, 2013
It's 8:20 and you're in the breakfast room at your hotel, having your customary bowl of muesli. By 9:20, you're watching a spurned wife cut off... More >>
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Alfonso Cuaron's Gravity is Lightning From the Heavens
published August 29, 2013
The late, great Elmore Leonard advised writers never to open a book with weather. Does a lightning storm count? Last evening I was welcomed to... More >>
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Venice Update: Nicolas Cage and the Misery of Joe
published August 29, 2013
As at most festivals, screenings at Venice are preceded by a recorded message asking... More >>
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The World’s End Review: A Pub Crawl to End All Pub Crawls
published August 22, 2013
The laddish pleasures of The World's End, Edgar Wright's comedy about a group of middle-aged guys drinking beer and facing mortality,... More >>
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Wong Kar-wai’s The Grandmaster Has Been Cut Down for the U.S. — But Is Still Grand
published August 22, 2013
Plenty of film critics and Asian-cinema aficionados care deeply that The Grandmaster, Wong Kar-wai's pointillist biopic of... More >>
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Lee Daniels' The Butler Chronicles the Civil Rights Movement Through the Eyes of a White House Servant
published August 15, 2013
At the movies, straightforward storytelling, the kind in which a director and his cast push a story forward in waves of action and feeling, has... More >>
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In Jobs, Ashton Kutcher Almost Reveals the Man Beyond the Devices
published August 15, 2013
Geniuses, unfortunately, tend to be impossible people. Consumed by their own dazzling brilliance, they treat those closest to them cruelly and... More >>
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Elysium Is Too Heavy for Matt Damon to Carry
published August 8, 2013
Movie stars shouldn't be subject to the rules of gravity, as we mere mortals are. One of the great pleasures of watching actors is to see them... More >>
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The Canyons, Starring Lindsay Lohan and Porn Star James Deen
published August 8, 2013
A movie can be highly imperfect, stilted or implausible in all sorts of ways — and still be everything you go to the movies for. The... More >>
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The Canyons Is Vital, Messy, and Alive With Regret
published August 1, 2013
A movie can be highly imperfect, stilted, or implausible in all sorts of ways—and still be everything you go to the movies for. The... More >>
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Woody Allen's Blue Jasmine Feels Like It Takes Place on Another Planet
published July 25, 2013
For anyone who's been going to the movies at all regularly over the past 45 years, Woody Allen is practically family. His movies may draw fewer... More >>
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Too Bad The Wolverine Isn't as Interesting as Hugh Jackman
published July 25, 2013
As summer comic-book blockbusters go, The Wolverine is not as elephantine as it could have been. It’s more,... More >>
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Only God Forgives Is So Ridiculous It's Hard to Take It Seriously
published July 18, 2013
Incest, eyeball-gouging, interior decorating: If Only God Forgives is any indication, writer-director Nicolas Winding Refn is a man of... More >>
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Red 2 Isn't Great, but Helen Mirren? Fabulous
published July 18, 2013
The world is full of lackluster movies. But the world is not full of Helen Mirren in a Marlene Dietrich fedora, or Helen Mirren in... More >>
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Fruitvale Station Makes a Man Out of a Martyr
published July 11, 2013
In the early hours of New Year's Day 2009, on a platform of Oakland's Fruitvale Bay Area Rapid Transit Station, a young man named Oscar Grant... More >>
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Pacific Rim Review: Guillermo del Toro Tries to Make a Better Blockbuster
published July 11, 2013
If the great god of movies, whatever slippery Mount Olympus of money he resides on, decrees that summer is the time for larger-than-life 3-D... More >>
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The Lone Ranger Is Such Disney Overkill That It Even Wastes Johnny Depp
published July 4, 2013
The great movie Westerns are about honor, dignity, the majesty of the landscape. But they're also about beautiful men — charismatic,... More >>
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Why You Should See LACMA's Series of Early Hitchcock Films
published June 27, 2013
The surest way to see if a film makes strong visual sense is to watch it with the sound turned off, a test plenty of today's movies would fail,... More >>
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Byzantium Review: Neil Jordan Does Another Vampire Movie
published June 27, 2013
We have the Twilight franchise to thank for the fact that almost no sane adult wants to see another vampire movie, ever. Not that all... More >>
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The Heat Would Be More Likable If It Stopped Yelling Everything
published June 27, 2013
If you've never seen Sandra Bullock blow a peanut shell out of her nose, and you'd like to, The Heat is your movie.... More >>
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World War Z Gets the Action Right But Botches the Bigger Ideas
published June 20, 2013
Destruction is scary, but not half as scary as the act of rebuilding, the moment of looking at the random, jagged pieces you've got left and... More >>
