Film

A film of ideas, “The Reader” sometimes suffers from its own pretensions.

Darren Aronofsky’s ‘The Wrestler’ provides a meditation on morality

Gus Van Sant’s ‘Milk,’ reviewed

Danny Boyle’s ‘Slumdog Millionaire’

Danny Boyle’s ‘Slumdog Millionaire’

Baz Luhrmann’s ‘Australia’

John Patrick Shanley’s ‘Doubt’ looks at the darkness to be encountered even within the most sacred locales

When a film takes in over $100 million in its first weekend, no one much cares what reviewers say about it. The corporate verdict is in. Negative reactions can be dismissed as “elitist,” a word that has become pivotal in presidential campaign rhetoric. Positive comments can be lamented a

Novelists are liars. So are filmmakers. In their search for the truth artists find mundane reality quite unsuited to their purposes. The only solution lies in creating an alternative universe, where events and personalities lead to desired conclusions. In “Burnt Norton” T. S. Eliot observed, “

As a title, No Country for Old Men boasts a noble ancestry. It traces its roots through the novel by Cormac McCarthy to the opening line of William Butler Yeats’s poem “Sailing to Byzantium.” In the poem Yeats yearns to leave the ephemeral world of “whatever is begotten, born