Chris Packham

With his stately drawl, Morgan Freeman has narrated nonfiction documentaries about penguins, slavery, the lemurs of Madagascar, ancient Egyptian pharaohs and the expansion of the universe. His is a voice of authority tempered by warmth and wisdom, capable of evoking felt human experience and the majesty of creation. In writer-director......

"This is the first generation that is expected to live shorter lives than their parents," says Katie Couric, narrator of Stephanie Soechtig's documentary, Fed Up. It's an infuriating statement, given both the preventability of that outcome and the institutional opposition to the solutions, the primary conflict that drives the film......

It’s a dumbfounding irony that the fiction of the “entitled, selfish millennial” was invented by baby boomers. The generation that created Saturday Night Live and National Lampoon grew up to be weirdly deaf to irony, and probably won’t even get what a damning metaphor Last Vegas accidentally turns out to......

Nobody ever accused James Franco of a lack of ambition, and adapting a book as unfilmable as William Faulkner's masterpiece, As I Lay Dying, is a decidedly ambitious gesture. Faulkner wrote the novel like a man on fire, working days at a power plant and writing late into the night......

In Joss Whedon's The Avengers, Iron Man gets off a good burn on Thor during their intramural fight in the woods: "Shakespeare in the park?" he says. "Doth mother know you weareth her drapes?" Like any good Shakespearean pastiche, The Avengers began in media res, with a glowy cube thing......

The unlikeliest of all the Hangover trilogy's comic implausibilities might be its four pampered, rich-boy leads unironically calling themselves the "Wolf Pack" without anybody ever making fun of them. In the slobs-versus-snobs comedies of the 1970s and '80s, the snooty rich kids were always the antagonists, bullying the nerds and......

Unlike such vengeful, justice-dispensing figures as Jehovah and RoboCop, the traditional pantheon of made-up childhood gods is all carrot and no stick, dispensing toys, hiding hard-boiled eggs and remunerating children for their deciduous teeth. It's fun to tell lies to tiny people with an instinctive predisposition to believe everything grown-ups......

There's an unfun tendency in American life to fictionalize our national heroes as rigid, statue-people who only speak as though they are delivering commencement addresses, with a kind of unlovable, Al Gore–ish anti-charisma that would inhibit anyone in real life from becoming a national hero in the first place. Own......