Stephanie Zacharek

Incest, eyeball-gouging, interior decorating: If Only God Forgives is any indication, writer-director Nicolas Winding Refn is a man of many interests. He's also put Kristin Scott Thomas in a blond wig and an assortment of cougar-mom outfits, which is either a plus or a minus, depending on how you look......

If the great god of movies, whatever slippery Mount Olympus of money he resides on, decrees that summer is the time for larger-than-life 3-D blockbusters, Guillermo del Toro may as well make one. His Pacific Rim is summer entertainment with a pulse. The effects are so overscaled and lavish as......

The great movie Westerns are about honor, dignity, the majesty of the landscape. But they're also about beautiful men — charismatic, sometimes dangerous-looking demigods like Robert Ryan, James Stewart, Franco Nero, Randolph Scott and, of course, John Wayne. The Lone Ranger has Armie Hammer and Johnny Depp, the former a......

The surest way to see if a film makes strong visual sense is to watch it with the sound turned off, a test plenty of today's movies would fail, given how many filmmakers rely on exposition and voice-overs to move things along. The chance to watch one of the great......

We have the Twilight franchise to thank for the fact that almost no sane adult wants to see another vampire movie, ever. Not that all the Twilight movies were bad. The first, directed by Catherine Hardwicke, hit a teen-dream sweet spot, the point where gothic lit meets the iPod. And......

Destruction is scary, but not half as scary as the act of rebuilding, the moment of looking at the random, jagged pieces you've got left and wondering how the hell you're going to fit them together. In Marc Forster's World War Z, the world as we know it — or......

Until 2005 or so, no one thought much about modern piracy of the high-seas variety. But then Somali pirates began attacking merchant ships with increasing frequency, seizing vessels and holding their crews hostage for outlandish sums. Danish director Tobias Lindholm's wiry, neatly crafted thriller A Hijacking wrests fact into the......