Nick Pinkerton

HAPPYTHANKYOUMOREPLEASE Sam (Josh Radnor) lives a slightly slummy version of sitcom-character leisure, his flirtatious lip-pursing in East Village bars financed by his short-fiction sales. ("Freelance writing" is defined herein as a career involving immaculate stubble, vertically stacked paperbacks and occasional glancing at a laptop.) Sam's routine is disturbed when he......

DRIVE ANGRY Genre-unto-himself Nicolas Cage's latest displays much the same tattoo-parlor hellfire imagery as Ghost Rider, but this is the hard-R version, with Johnny Blaze's jellybeans from a goblet in the earlier film now replaced by a cold after-work beer drunk from a human skull. Cage plays a black-denim God’s......

JUSTIN BIEBER: NEVER SAY NEVER The Bieber movie, a concert experience and origin-myth documentary, is not good — not that it needs to be. It is draggily paced and lacks felicity of form; the 3-D is a rip-off and the songs are pap, save a snippet of Etta James singing......

THE ROOMMATE It’s exactly what you thought it would be: A plagiarized, campus-set Single White Female pitched to teens, The Roommate traces over scenes from Barbet Schroeder’s sleepover classic with no notable improvement (the big-gasp “This girl is crazy” moment moves from the hairdresser's to a tattoo parlor; the menaced......

THE RITE The latest of at least a dozen widely released American movies in half as many years with demonic possession as a major plot point, The Rite introduces the exorcist — here, Father Lucas (Anthony Hopkins, disarmingly distracted, softly authoritative and given to prancing when the role takes a......

WHEN WE LEAVE With her young son in tow, Umay (Head-On's Sibel Kekilli) walks out on her abusive husband and foregone conclusion of a life in Istanbul. She returns to her family in Berlin, where she grew up and, presumably, assimilated a larger idea of her possibilities. But to her......

A SOMEWHAT GENTLE MAN A low-life comedy in registers of Norse pallor and reticence, A Somewhat Gentle Man begins with ex-thug Ulrik (Stellan Skarsgard) paroled from a 12-year sentence for murder. Returning to the seedy milieu he left behind, on the outskirts of an unnamed city, Ulrik is a watchful,......

SEASON OF THE WITCH Season of the Witch begins in a Crusade taking place after the Crusades, in a 14th Century for Dummies about as immersive and real as the Ohio State Renaissance Festival. Disillusioned, defected knights Behmen and Felson (Nicolas Cage and Ron Perlman) retreat home across a hotchpotch......