Steve James documentaries get you inside. By the end of a James film — Hoop Dreams, Stevie, the inexplicably non-shortlisted The Interrupters — you know the subjects like cousins. You care what happens to them, …

Woody Allen stand-ins work best when played by Woody Allen himself. Allen’s voice is so distinctive, and his heroes generally so him despite cosmetic name changes (Alvy Singer, Larry Lipton), that in other hands the …

Suburban-Jersey lawyer Mike Flaherty (Paul Giamatti), who seems to represent seniors exclusively, is floundering. The office needs a new boiler and a new toilet, a dead tree on his front lawn needs removing, he’s got …

Watching Kansas City for the plot is probably not the best way to enjoy the film, for two reasons. The first is that the plot is primarily an excuse to take the audience on an …

I have a culinary question for the readers. My diet is probably around 25% popcorn. I’m shoving fistfuls of it in my mouth for dinner at least three times a week. I make it on the stove …

The Woodmans is a really interesting movie and also an uncomfortable mess, much like one of its subjects, and I don’t quite know how to go about reviewing it, or even describing how I reacted …

Albert Nobbs has two big secrets. One is that he’s socking away money, farthing by painstaking farthing, under a floorboard in the servant’s quarters, at the hotel where he works as a butler.
The other, and …

This is one of those “some friendships have a lifespan” problems, I suppose. Years ago, when I was at secondary school, I was friends with L. We were really close, but being teenagers we fell …

My esteemed colleague Couch Baron, blowing off The Artist with the combined force and economy of that air-puff glaucoma test you get at the eye doctor, described the film as, among other things, “so up …

Adaptations of Shakespeare: not for me. In fact, Shakespeare’s plays, page or stage: not for me. Shakespeare’s verse is a different story, and yes, I know he wrote the plays in verse, and yes, I…know. …