Nick Pinkerton

THE ROMANTICS As Galt Niederhoffer's comedy of no manners begins, seven college friends, now closing in on their 30s, come together for the wedding of two of their clique at the bride-to-be's beachfront family home. Once dubbed "The Romantics" for their share-and-share-alike dating patterns, the pals reunite for a flashback......

A WOMAN, A GUN AND A NOODLE SHOP Following up his Beijing Olympics opening ceremony megaproduction, Zhang Yimou remakes the Coen Brothers' Blood Simple by dressing it up in flamboyant silk and translating it into Mandarin. The honky-tonk of the Coens' Southwestern noir becomes a noodle-shop compound on the edge......

With a small, well-chosen cast, sly script and slippery, ambivalent characters, The Last Exorcism gives a welcome twist to the demonic-possession movie revival. A fourth-generation minister, Cotton Marcus (Patrick Fabian) of Baton Rouge's Church of St. Mark was groomed for the pulpit. Onetime child preacher Cotton has grown out of......

A few years and 2,500 miles apart, teenagers inspired by photos of Dad in uniform and From Here to Eternity undertake their separate 8mm war epics. Both are the works of prodigies weaned on double features, later loved or reviled for holding onto their childlike innocence. Little Stevie Spielberg shot......

Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island, a florid art shocker that Paramount welcomed into the world with the strained enthusiasm of a mutant baby's parents, begins with U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) seasick, head in the toilet. The film is his prolonged purging, with Daniels coughing up chunks of his backstory......

As personal assistant to the U.S. ambassador to France, James Reese (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) can keep himself in well-tailored suits and keep his terrific-looking, kittenish girlfriend (Kasia Smutniak) in a nice Paris apartment. This is the basis for director Pierre Morel's delicate study in transatlantic manners, From Paris With Love,......

The social-networking site gay.com and distributor Regent Releasing present a tripl bill of same sexer–themed movies. In descending order, from middling to empirically bad: Watercolors — the most professional job, and the only one that takes a stab at eros — is a My First Time jock-on-nerd love affair done......

Directors Allen and Albert Hughes were raised by an Armenian mother and African-American father. With such a background, it would be difficult not to have feelings about the church. The Hugheses’ fourth film, The Book of Eli, centers on the Christianity that was at the margins of their previous films — hypocritically misused by Bokeem Woodbine’s bush-crazy Marine turned pulpit-pounder turned stick-up man in Dead......

Yesterday’s honky-tonk hero, Bad Blake, arrives at a Clovis, New Mexico, bowling alley. It’s another in a string of low-paying, low-turnout gigs with pickup bands half his age, grinding the Greatest Hits out of an old Fender Tremolux, including his breakout — with the chorus, “Funny how falling feels like......

Think of it as a wake for Pontiac. Three drag-racing movies, three decades of cars, shifting attitudes toward rule of law and youth culture as seen through the drive-in projector. Hot Rod Girl (a.k.a. Hot Car Girl) (1956) ’55 T-Bird. Misunderstood but essentially good kids, these juvies are strictly squaresville,......