Stephanie Zacharek

As at most festivals, screenings at Venice are preceded by a recorded message asking everyone to turn off their cellphones. A very cultured-sounding lady delivers this request first in Italian and then in English. She caps off the English version with the words, "Thank you for your collaboration." My what?......

The laddish pleasures of The World's End, Edgar Wright's comedy about a group of middle-aged guys drinking beer and facing mortality, come with a bittersweet edge. In the old days, the lead character, Gary King, used to be the coolest kid in school, at least in the outlaw sense: He'd......

Plenty of film critics and Asian-cinema aficionados care deeply that The Grandmaster, Wong Kar-wai's pointillist biopic of martial-arts master Ip Man and the director's first picture in six years, will be released in the United States only in a 108-minute version. The cut released in China earlier this year was......

At the movies, straightforward storytelling, the kind in which a director and his cast push a story forward in waves of action and feeling, has become so out of fashion that it's almost avant-garde. Moviegoers, it seems, need to be cool: not too moved, not too surprised, not too impressed......

Geniuses, unfortunately, tend to be impossible people. Consumed by their own dazzling brilliance, they treat those closest to them cruelly and thoughtlessly, causing much undue suffering — only to turn around and invent a device that can put 1,000 songs in your pocket. Damn them. If what we see in......

Movie stars shouldn't be subject to the rules of gravity, as we mere mortals are. One of the great pleasures of watching actors is to see them move, and when yesterday's youngsters start creaking, we feel it in our joints. That's not to say actors can't age gracefully, or that......

A movie can be highly imperfect, stilted or implausible in all sorts of ways — and still be everything you go to the movies for. The Canyons, Paul Schrader's contemplation of moral decay in Hollywood, is that kind of picture, in some places so crazy-silly you want to laugh and......

For anyone who's been going to the movies at all regularly over the past 45 years, Woody Allen is practically family. His movies may draw fewer passionate responses than they did in the 1970s and '80s, but we still feel compelled to reckon with him. Whenever Allen comes out with......

As summer comic-book blockbusters go, The Wolverine is not as elephantine as it could have been. It’s more, well, wolverine—bony, loping, a little shaggy—and, blessedly, director James Mangold doesn’t get bogged down in mythology. You don’t need to diagram the convoluted relationships between Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s X-Men characters......