In 2007, 4,703 children between the ages of 1 and 4 and 6,147 children aged 5 to 14 died in America. I feel like that’s actually less than I would have expected, but it’s still an almost unfathomable toll in terms of grief. And I think it’s unsurprising that even within the oft-filmed subsection of affluent white women who lose their children (God forbid we venture into the realm... 

Vulture’s complaining that, apparently, the first contemporary Western movie to make it into North Korea is Bend It Like Beckham. I actually quite like the flick, and particularly, Keira Knightley before she was British Beauty Personified. And I’d be fascinated to know what North Koreans made of it. I imagine given the impact of famine on North Korea’s food supply, the main character’s... 

So, I’m torn over the news that Jason Segal intends to revitalize the romantic comedy by shooting to make a movie with the substance of Annie Hall. There are days I think romantic comedies really just need to be put out of their misery. And other days when I don’t think Woody Allen’s extraordinarily specific vision is enough to turn a genre around that continued on to disaster despite... 

I feel like I don’t mention the New York Review of Books enough on this blog. Next to the New Yorker, it may be the finest periodical in the country, and the attention that it gives to culture is even more sustained, but a lot of its archives are behind a paywall, and so during the period when my subscription lapsed, I wasn’t always up to date and linking. All of which is to say that... 

Maybe it’s just that I’m a sucker for slightly dilapidated amusement parks and mini-golf courses, but the trailer for Hanna looks rather visually gorgeous, doesn’t it? And that’s before we actually get to the substance of the movie, Saoirse Ronan’s ethereal teenaged (and perhaps genetically engineered) assassin. I loved the father-daughter dynamic in Kick-Ass, though... 

On what makes a movie so bad it’s good, and why Showgirls is just bad.  Read More »

I find Love, Actually about as effective as emotional crack, but if I had to pick my favorite holiday movie of recent years, I’d probably actually name the unfairly overlooked The Family Stone: The movie’s somewhat forgotten as part of Sarah Jessica Parker’s efforts to find a role other than Carrie Bradshaw to carry her into the future. And there’s an extent to which it’s... 

The idea of a Shakespeare In Love sequel is hideously stupid, and does a dishonor to one of the great romantic comedies of the last decade. The whole thing that made Shakespeare in Love terrific is that ultimately, it’s a story of love denied, it gives a lie to the idea that the story ends happily. More romantic movies would do well to emulate that, to acknowledge the truth that most... 

I didn’t particularly like Ghost World when I saw it: I think it’s entirely possible the movie hit too damn close to home for me. It was the summer after my senior year of college, and I watched it with one of my very few friends at the time. It was before either of us knew that we were going to grow up enough, and figure enough things out, to find a way through our lives that didn’t... 

I Watch Stuff is approaching Russell Brand’s latest with some reasonable suspicion. And I will be curious enough to see if the man who gave us Aldous Snow can make mainstream American audiences go see a movie about a supernatural temp agency—much less a movie about a grown man with a nanny. I find Brand fascinating because I think he’s the most inherently British actor and comedian...