Stephanie Zacharek

Rosemary's Baby notwithstanding, it's usually only white suburban people who fall prey to movie ghosts and demons -- they're always the ones opening doors to rooms that shouldn't be entered, stepping witlessly into pentagrams painted on the floor in goat's blood, and wondering aloud, "You think this is some sort......

Martin Scorsese's The Wolf of Wall Street is the kind of movie that directors make when they wield money, power and a not inconsiderable degree of arrogance. Sprawling and extravagant, it revels in all manner of excess, including sexual debauchery, hearty abuse of liquor and Quaaludes, even dwarf-tossing. Its antihero,......

Without big truth-telling scenes, grand, great-lady, Meryl Streep–type actors would be out of work. Hell, Meryl Streep would be out of work. But for now, at least, August: Osage County, John Wells' film adaptation of Tracy Letts' Pulitzer Prize–winning Broadway hit, keeps her out of the bread line. Streep plays......

Here's where I write about how hard it is to draw up a year-end 10-best list. Except it isn't: I think of drawing up a list as an honor and a necessity, a way of putting 12 months of moviegoing into some sort of perspective — if not necessarily into......