Nick Pinkerton

Midnight (1939), in which penniless cab driver Don Ameche pursues American gold-digger Claudette Colbert across a Paramount–back lot Paris, is one of the most well-turned, crisply paced comedies of the antic 1930s. Its director, Mitchell Leisen, was once Paramount's contract mainstay, but his reputation has shriveled in subsequent decades —......

The yammering about "Oscar gold" and Denzel Washington's potential three-peat soon will reach a deafening pitch, but such noise can only embarrass a fine character study like Flight, whose prevailing tone is melancholy. The mood is there from the opening pan across the Orlando airport under gray, inclement skies, tilting......

For 11 months of the year, horror movies live a skulking, marginalized existence, despised, like carnival freaks, by the studios for whom they turn a profit, the same studios whose PR departments guiltily slip them by critics. Then ... October! All Hallow's Eve! Samhain! Trick or treat! — and however......