Nick Pinkerton

Can any one of the millions of Americans who saw Men in Black 2 in 2002 describe its plot today? A single scene? I saw both MIB movies upon their original release and have as little memory of the experience as if I'd been mind-wiped with one of those "neuralyzing"......

Jean Renoir's Grand Illusion opened in an anxious France in June 1937, as wars were going badly for the Spanish and Chinese republics and Picasso's Guernica was drying on the easel. Set during the Great War and released while the thunderheads of the next gathered, Grand Illusion depicted the wartime......

There is a moment at the end of Robert Bresson's penultimate film, The Devil, Probably (1977), when Charles (Antoine Monnier), a young man who has decided on suicide as an abstaining vote against the options offered by society, pauses in his death march to listen to a snatch of a......

A significant portion of Tim Burton's output over the past decade has been concerned with slipping the "Burton treatment" to susceptible texts: Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd, Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland — and now, Dark Shadows. A supernaturally themed daily daytime soap,......

Richard Linklater's Bernie is the rarest of rarities: a truly unexpected film. It might be classified as a black comedy, for it deals with the murder of an 81-year-old woman in a fashion that is not exactly tragic. But unlike most movies that fall under that label, it never indulges......

With The Deep Blue Sea, the great British director Terence Davies returns to the postwar period — although, in a sense, he has never left. Born in 1945, Davies' cinema is defined by a mixed pity and fondness for the world of yesterday, a past he seemingly finds impossible to......

Béla Tarr, the Hungarian director who became something like the patron saint of slow cinema with 1994's 450-minute Sátántangó, has made some of the toughest endurance tests in film history. Watching his latest, The Turin Horse (co-credited to Ágnes Hranitzky), is an experience comparable to starting down the road with......

"There's no one way to live our lives," hopes the displaced, adrift couple at the center of Wanderlust. Shopping between the prefab identity options available to them — squeezed, stressed urban professionalism; suburban McMansion soul death; rural counterculture opting out — George and Linda (Paul Rudd and Jennifer Aniston) are......

Act of Valor is, according to the opening titles, "based on real acts of valor," whatever that means. It stars real active-duty Navy SEALs, and much of it was filmed with live-fire ammunition. None of the above works to strengthen the muddled movie's dramatic narrative, but the film's boasted authenticity......