Stephanie Zacharek

One of the tragedies of the Internet age is that sometimes movies get attention for all the wrong reasons. When Abdellatif Kechiche (The Secret of the Grain) debuted Blue Is the Warmest Color at Cannes in May, the festival jury was so taken with the film and its two lead......

Steve McQueen's 12 Years a Slave is the movie for people who think they're too smart for Lee Daniels' The Butler. The story it tells, a true one, is horrifying: In 1841, Solomon Northup, a free, educated black man from Saratoga, N.Y., was kidnapped, sold into slavery and transported to......

Tom Hanks has built a career on playing aggressively noble roles, so it's only natural to want to see him taken down a peg. But it's no fun to watch him suffer at the hands of Somali pirates in Paul Greengrass' true-life adventure Captain Phillips. Hanks plays the commander of...

Sometimes it's the little things in a movie that get you. Early in George Tillman Jr.'s The Inevitable Defeat of Mister & Pete, a bright but obstreperous 13-year-old inner-city kid — the Mister of the title, played by Skylan Brooks — bounces back from the trauma of getting an F...

Some movies are so tense and deeply affecting that they shave years off your life as you're watching, only to give back that lost time, and more, at the end. Alfonso Cuarón's Gravity is one of those movies. Sandra Bullock and George Clooney play astronauts — one a medical engineer,...

To paraphrase The Bee Gees, Joseph Gordon-Levitt should be dancing. He's already done it in (500) Days of Summer, where he led an exuberant ensemble routine that out–Dr Peppered any Dr Pepper commercial. Then there was his smashing Saturday Night Live re-creation of Donald O'Connor's "Make 'Em Laugh" — like......

It's 1976, a year when all the groovy girls are traipsing around in tiny suede skirts and all the cool guys have Badfinger hair. One of those guys was English racing car driver James Hunt, the charismatic rapscallion who won that year's Formula 1 World Championship — the embroidered badge......

It's 8:20 and you're in the breakfast room at your hotel, having your customary bowl of muesli. By 9:20, you're watching a spurned wife cut off her teenage son's penis--and eat it--as retribution for her husband's infidelity. Ah, Tuesday. But wow, Kim Ki-duk's Moebius is some movie! If you have......