Stephanie Zacharek

Beware the movie that's Fun! with a capital F, the one populated with seemingly unpretentious characters who say adorable, clever things, the one that presents each off-kilter joke as if it were a porcelain curio, the one that boasts a comfort-food soundtrack of songs you've always liked but perhaps haven't......

He couldn't have known it at the time, but James Brown's debut recording and first chart hit — made in 1956 with The Famous Flames — is a question that contains its own answer. The lyrics to "Please, Please, Please" speak, pretty obviously, of sexual desire. But Brown's voice is......

Wish I Was Here, partially funded with money raised through Kickstarter by actor and second-time director Zach Braff, isn't nearly terrible enough to satisfy all the grumblers who are hoping to see it fail. When Braff couldn't secure traditional financing for the film, he appealed to the fan base he'd......

The business of childhood is the business of waiting: waiting for Christmas, waiting for school to let out, waiting to be old enough to stay up past 9. No other movie I can think of better captures the wistfulness of those days full of waiting than Richard Linklater's Boyhood, an......

Let's get the obvious bit over with: The early days of the Beatles, as reflected in Richard Lester's ebullient shout of freedom, A Hard Day's Night, were all about the optimism of the early 1960s, a thrilling and energizing time when young people, and even some older ones, truly believed......

Plays adapted into movies always feel naked by the time they make it to the screen, their theatrical bones showing through in a most awkward and unbecoming way. That's more or less true of Roman Polanski's screen version of David Ives' Venus in Fur, in which playwright and first-time director......

To call Roger Ebert one of the great populist film critics is to damn him with faint praise. Though he took pride in working for the scrappier of the two Chicago dailies, the Sun-Times, and though we do have him to thank — or curse — for popularizing the thumbs-up/thumbs-down......