Stephanie Zacharek

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......

The terrible reality of modern life is that even beautiful young people on a first date can't go a whole evening without checking their phones. We need to be potentially connected to every possibility at all times; just allowing the present to happen has become increasingly foreign. That's the idea......

The best movies about con artists work a bit of flimflammery themselves. They're not necessarily dishonest; they just can't resist making the truth shinier than it is in real life. There may not be much behind the sparkling tinsel curtain of David O. Russell's extraordinarily entertaining American Hustle. But what......

Folk music is supposed to be the music of the people. Yet at the heart of Joel and Ethan Coen's Inside Llewyn Davis, set in New York in the winter of 1961, is a folksinger with no feeling for people. Llewyn Davis, played by Oscar Isaac, is a broke, rumpled......

The life of Russell Baze, a steelworker in a Pennsylvania town just outside of Pittsburgh, may be drab and dreary, but he's a good, hardworking man with a loving girlfriend. His younger brother, Rodney, has it tougher: A war vet suffering from PTSD, Rodney hasn't been able to readjust to......

It says something that two of the biggest sensations in young-adult literature over the past 10 years have featured heroines who keep more than one guy on the line at a time. No longer do the genre's bright young women sit around waiting for one Mr. Right to notice them......

Weight-loss and weight-gain performances are tricky things. Robert De Niro's heavily mannered turn in Raging Bull just has to be great — he gained 60 pounds for it, didn't he? For his role in The Machinist, Christian Bale dropped to a subskeletal 122 pounds — he looked like a walking,......