Nick Pinkerton

Both warning and advertisement, the Terminator films are technophobic teases, selling tickets by promising this decade’s model of killing machine: the classic V8 1984 Schwarzenegger; the bullet-streamlined, liquid-metal ’91 Robert Patrick of T2: Judgment Day; Kristanna Loken’s 2003 T-X (with burgundy pleather upholstery). Terminator Salvation, a departure in many ways,......

“That was the most offensive display of sexualized violence I have ever seen,” one wilting fellow in need of a camphor hankie was overheard saying in the elevator after the screening. Such blanching is the reaction The Last House on the Left is trolling for, but I doubt it will......

What Howard Hawks did best — whichever studio signed the check (over 44 years, he worked for them all), whatever genre he operated in (ditto) — was clear space for his actors and encourage them to really react to each other. This is so rudimentary that most don’t even bother......

A hustling river port on the Nieuwe Maas, with a glassy, ultramodern skyline that might’ve been laid out in SimCity, Rotterdam once a year comes down with a case of Film Festival. This most determinedly obscurantist of the European majors falls in the dead of January and is positioned as......

Brendan “Kids’ Choice” Fraser returns to the multiplex daycare as “Mo” Folchart, antiquarian-book repairman cum adventurer. In Inkheart’s opening chapter, he’s identified as a member of a race of “Silvertongues” — those who, when they read aloud, can suck people out of and into the texts that they’re reciting from......

The title character in Charlie Chaplin’s Monsieur Verdoux (played by Chaplin, of course) is a dainty ex–bank clerk, laid off during the French market’s crash. Verdoux applies time-clock-honed efficiency to his private practice: teasing the heartstrings of wealthy matrons so as to relieve them of their savings accounts and lives......

Native Texan writer-director Eagle Pennell's allegiance was with the also-rans. In 2002, with seven films to his credit but his hustle gone, he died in his sleep at age 50, lonesome, orn'ry and mean, unwound by years of couch-crashing and hell-raising, having exhausted the patience of everyone who ever believed......

Persepolis is a small landmark in feature animation. Not because of technical innovation — though it has a handcrafted charm forgotten in the era of CGI-’toon juggernauts — but because it translates an introspective, true-to-life, “adult” comic story into moving pictures. With the aid of French comic book artist Vincent......