Stephanie Zacharek

See also: *The Bling Ring Guide to L.A.: A Google Map Delicacy of touch isn't a particularly valued commodity among American filmmakers. We like pioneer swagger in our directors; particularly in the age of the blockbuster, open-ended questions and eyelash-fringe feelings are suspect. That's why it's always been hard to......

Zack Snyder's Man of Steel is a movie event with an actual movie inside, crying to get out. Despite its preposterous self-seriousness, its overblown, CGI'ed-to-death climax, and its desperate efforts to depict the destruction of, well, everything on Earth, there's greatness in this retelling of the origin of Superman, moments......

Eager young people can't find jobs; qualified older people can't find jobs. There's nothing funny about that, which is exactly why someone ought to be making comedies about it. The Internship, in which downtrodden old-school salespeople Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson enter the 21st century and land internships at Google,......

Anyone trying to run a civilized country should know that throwing musicians in jail for making music is always a bad idea. That didn't stop Vladimir Putin's government from arresting three members of the punk collective Pussy Riot, after the group stormed the altar of the Cathedral of Christ the......

Inside Llewyn Davis, Joel & Ethan Coen Here's cockeyed humanism at its best. This marvelous, surreptitiously soulful movie, about a gifted but unlikable folk singer in early 1960s New York, stars Oscar Isaac as Llewyn Davis, the remaining half of a semi-successful folksinging duo who's trying to make it on......

Ask people about their favorite movies and the same titles come up regularly — Casablanca, Pulp Fiction, Annie Hall, Citizen Kane. But some films have special meaning for people even if they don't turn up on lists of established favorites. These are the secret movies we keep in our pockets......

There's a thing that sometimes happens to copy editors, the workhorses who do the final grammar cleanup, general fine-tuning and, sometimes, miracle working before a story goes to print: An editor higher on the food chain will receive a disheveled manuscript from a writer, make a few halfhearted tweaks and......