Stephanie Zacharek

Friendships between women have the ambiguous vitality of growing vines: They can either strangle or nurture, and at times it can be hard to tell the difference. That's particularly true for young women first stepping into the puzzling gray area of rivalries and loyalties. How best to support your friends......

The hardest type of guy for an actor to play is one without charisma. That's the challenge Tobey Maguire faces in Edward Zwick's Pawn Sacrifice, which tells the story of Cold War–era chess champ and totally strange human being Bobby Fischer. Maguire is good at it — maybe too good......

James "Whitey" Bulger was more like a character from a 17th-century folktale than a late–20th century criminal, the sort of figure who'd murder innocents on wooded roadways and then, with a shrug, toss their bloody bones to hungry wild dogs. In 1980s and early-'90s Boston, he headed a criminal syndicate......

In the mid–20th century, movie audiences understood the value of a good melodrama: A picture such as Now, Voyager or Black Narcissus or almost anything by Douglas Sirk could be an urn into which you poured your own unarticulated feelings of loss and loneliness. The heightened, unrealistic intensity of those......

There's a lot to laugh at in Daniel Lee's faux-historical Silk Road adventure Dragon Blade, not least of which is the sight of Adrien Brody as corrupt Roman consul Tiberius wearing a tumble of raven-colored beauty-queen curls and purring in a phony British thespian's accent. With his blue crushed-velvet cape......

A sense of humor will take you far in life, even along a daunting stretch of the Appalachian Trail. In his hugely popular 1998 book A Walk in the Woods, Bill Bryson chronicled his attempt to hike the full length of the trail, from Georgia to Maine, accompanied by an......

There's a strain of science fiction writing that evokes a chilly kind of coziness, usually by introducing us to individuals or small groups of people who have found their way to the country in the hope of escaping encroaching doom. John Wyndham's bleak, beautiful 1951 novel The Day of the......

Young people are the only ones who ever talk about growing old gracefully. For those actually in the thick of it, the romance of that notion burns off pretty quickly, and wrinkles and creaky joints are the least of it: Growing old, gracefully or otherwise, means becoming the person you......

In a world gone mad for superhero movies, what chance does the light spy caper have? Audiences will put total faith in a guy wearing a red metal suit, but the soft woolen folds of the bespoke kind barely register. When a whole city can be blasted to smithereens thanks......

It's been 32 years since the release of National Lampoon's Vacation, in which Chevy Chase, as dad Clark Griswold, packed his Griswold clan into what looked like a Country Squire from hell and sought the family-bonding experience™ by driving cross-country to the mythical mega–amusement park known as Walley World. If......