Scott Foundas

The Place Beyond the Pines opens with a close-up of Ryan Gosling's chiseled abdomen — surely one of the more salable commodities in movies today — and heavy breathing on the soundtrack (or was that just the person next to me in the screening room?) Then in a single, five-minute......

"All you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun," goes Jean-Luc Godard's quip. Add to that a few more girls and their bikinis, and you have the rough formula for Harmony Korine's Spring Breakers, which looks like the most expensive Girls Gone Wild video ever made......

The hills of Cristian Mungiu's Beyond the Hills (Dupa dealuri) are a barren canvas of straw grass and leafless trees, framed by a winter's sky. Nothing, it would seem, can grow here — save for fanatical faith. It is on this barren land that a priest known as Papa (Valeriu......

It's a bad omen when, early on in Oz the Great and Powerful, we learn that the full given name of its wizard is Oscar, also the ceremony that star James Franco once presided over as calamitously as he does this sagging Disney tentpole, a gargantuan attempt to turn L......

To paraphrase Stephen Sondheim, there are big, tall, terrible, fleshy, bulbous-headed giants in the sky in Jack the Giant Slayer. And what would a big-budget, mildly revisionist, 3-D spin on "Jack and the Beanstalk" be if those fearsome beasties didn't somehow make it down to sea level, where a storybook......

Like the yearning Jimmy Van Heusen/Johnny Burke torch song that lends it its title, Abbas Kiarostami's Like Someone in Love is a sly, teasing riff on the heart's irrational stirrings. But the film's true spirit is even better encapsulated by "Training a Parrot," an early–20th century painting by the Japanese......