Nick Pinkerton

Paul Dano and screenwriter Zoe Kazan in Ruby Sparks; Credit: PHOTO BY MERRICK MORTON

Ruby Sparks Review: Paul Dano Invents a Girlfriend

Nick Pinkerton
It's one of the most cherished legends of the American indie: A socially retarded ugly duck, despite making no effort to regulate his glaring emotional hang-ups, is discovered as a swan by a clearly out-of-his-league girl who loves him just the way he is. Buffalo '66 (1999) and Punch-Drunk Love......
The Dark Knight Rises

Dark Knight Rises Review

Nick Pinkerton
Christopher Nolan's ponderous, pontifical action movies are written less as screenplays than as operator's manuals, guiding an audience through assembling their important themes while scrupulously making sure you don't miss a thing. This is as true of Inception, with its reams of expositional walk-through, as of Nolan's superhero saga, now......
People Like Us; Credit: PHOTO © DREAMWORKS II DISTRIBUTION CO.

People Like Us Review

Nick Pinkerton
People Like Us is a certifiable adult drama built atop sturdy thematic supports, a rare enough item these days, though it's telling that the movie was originally titled Welcome to People, after a self-help workbook within the film. Sam (Chris Pine), a career-obsessed New York wheeler-dealer, is reeled back to......

The Color Wheel Review

Nick Pinkerton
Les Enfants Terribles Alex Ross Perry's The Color Wheel Alex Ross Perry's second feature, shot in 16mm black-and-white, is an offhand, picaresque road-trip movie with a mock-epic Northeastern itinerary. It's also a cage-match brother-and-sister act revolving around the complementary relationship between JR (co-writer Carlen Altman), a defiantly unemployable broadcast-journalism major,......
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Prometheus Review: Ridley Scott's Epic

Nick Pinkerton
Arriving in theaters on the back of a portentous ad campaign, Ridley Scott's Prometheus assumes the air of something more than a summer movie, a blockbuster-with-brains that links the genesis and the ultimate fate of mankind beyond the stars. It is, incidentally, the story of an ambitious mission gone wrong......
The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant

Rainer Werner Fassbinder Series at American Cinematheque

Nick Pinkerton
In 1971's Beware of a Holy Whore, Rainer Werner Fassbinder bottled the anarchic atmosphere in which his art was created. In the lobby of a Spanish hotel, an idle group of technicians and actors waste time passing around bad karma like the clap, as we see the backstage drama, microcosmic......
Charlize Theron in Snow White and the Huntsman; Credit: PHOTO BY ALEX BAILEY

Snow White and the Huntsman Review

Nick Pinkerton
If ever there were a perfect example of pure, fresh, classical simplicity unnecessarily trodden under with complications, it is Snow White and the Huntsman. Had it trusted to the native charm of its cast and the sensory seduction of its often-astonishing images to humbly, naively retell its story, this Snow......