Melissa Anderson

A zealous gumbo of regionalism, magical realism, post-Katrina allegory, myth and ecological parable, Beasts of the Southern Wild, the southern Louisiana–set debut feature of 29-year-old Benh Zeitlin, rests, often cloyingly, on the tiny shoulders of Quvenzhané Wallis. Her character, Hushpuppy, the film's 6-year-old (also Wallis' age during filming) protagonist and......

Fans of Seth MacFarlane's Fox mainstay Family Guy who wish he would run afoul of FCC regulations every week might be pleased with Ted, the story of a 35-year-old man and his foul-talking teddy bear. Plushies, too, might be turned on by the pot-smoking, whore-banging CGI toy ursus of the......

With her flame-colored ringlets, Merida, the barely adolescent heroine of Pixar's 13th feature, looks like a wee Rebekah Brooks, maybe a pint-size Florence Welch. Despite these resemblances, Merida remains an original: Brave, set in the Scottish Highlands in the 10th century, is the animation studio's first film with a female......

In The Invisible War, Kirby Dick lays bare the scandalous epidemic of rape in the U.S. armed forces — the war on women who fight wars. Told through an array of talking heads — including servicewomen (and a few servicemen) who recount their attacks, military psychiatrists, NCIS agents, attorneys, journalists......

What's left to be said about Marcel Carné's towering, intimate epic of early 19th–century love and the lives of performers, often heralded as the greatest French film of all time? That Children of Paradise, being shown at the Playhouse and Royal theaters June 1-7 in a new 4K restoration, was......

Suitable entertainment for a Knights of Columbus fundraiser, Nanni Moretti's We Have a Pope finds the Most Holy Father, wracked with self-doubt about his new position, on a walkabout in Rome. Actor-writer-director Moretti's latest starts with broad physical comedy (a cardinal face-plants in the dark), introduces a potentially provocative idea......

When we're introduced to emaciated, bug-eyed and trembling Bobby Liebling, the 50-ish frontman of the frequently dormant cult metal band Pentagram and the subject of this small-scale but weirdly engrossing documentary, he's showing off his past stage outfits: perfectly preserved hip-huggers purchased in 1967, "paisley shit," chiffon scarves. "I was......

"If no one watches, then they don't have a game," a teenager says in this faithful if cautious adaptation of the first volume of Suzanne Collins' astronomically successful dystopic YA trilogy. A withering indictment of omnipresent screens, endless spectacle and debased celebrity culture, The Hunger Games was inspired, the author......

In the opening scene of Friends With Kids, a conspicuously placed copy of Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion on the bedside table of Jason (Adam Scott) marks him as a nonbeliever. His doubt also extends to conjugal matters, for he is unconvinced that married parents could ever be happy. Sharing......

The clean, orderly home has a particular hold on the Austrian imagination — specifically the basement, the nation's subterranean subconscious. This has not been lost on native filmmakers: Rainer Frimmel edited the video confessionals of a Viennese hospital orderly into the captivating Notes From the Basement (2001), while the brilliant......