Michelle Orange

CARBON NATION Built more like an education module than a documentary, Carbon Nation might make you nostalgic for those blissful days when the substitute teacher slapped on a science video and hid in the faculty lounge. Director Peter Byck opted for corny graphics, a wall of statistics, a voice-of-God narrator......

Men follow Angelina Jolie in The Tourist. Men and cameras. They follow her—chic, coiffed, assless—through the streets of Paris. They follow her onto the train to impossible, floating Venice, where she heads on the instruction of her shadowy, fugitive lover. Eventually, they follow fellow passenger Johnny Depp as well, but......

TODAY'S SPECIAL Cheerful in outline and yet prone to maudlin bulges in its middle, Today's Special stars Daily Show correspondent Aasif Mandvi as Samir, a sous-chef on the make in New York City. A second-generation immigrant with parents safely stowed in Queens, Samir has been toiling in the city's elite......

GO  THEY CAME TO PLAY A welcome twist on the now-ubiquitous kiddie competition doc, They Came to Play centers on the Van Cliburn Foundation's gathering of the world's best amateur pianists over the age of 35. "Amateur" is a word that makes most of the entrants bristle; it's also a......

KNUCKLEHEAD A schmaltzy family comedy that won't pass the smell test for kids, parents or even stoner second cousins, Knucklehead is too sluggish for young attention spans, and not inventive enough to keep adults engaged. When an orphanage run by a nun (Wendy Malick) and Jan from The Office (Melora......

GO GERRYMANDERING Jeff Reichert's Gerrymandering complements Inside Job, the recent indictment of the U.S. financial system, in two key ways: In giving a close and measured reading of the country's gonzo voting-district zoning practices, Reichert confirms Charles Ferguson's bleak conclusion that we have, for all intents and purposes, allowed a......

Cynics make the worst romantics; they should know better, they know they should know better, and they’d die if you knew better. Forced underground by a formative heartbreak, a cynic’s romantic nature can flourish into a sort of private dementia. You can take my weary word for it, or you......

Casting Nicole Kidman as The Golden Compass’s glacial, intractably smooth megalomaniac Mrs. Coulter is no less inspired for being obvious. Indeed, she was the first and only choice for director Chris Weitz, who adapted this first installment of Philip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” trilogy. Despite the book’s description of the......