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. …

John Douglas has a line in The Cases That Haunt Us where he’s wrapping up the Lindbergh case, and after reviewing all the evidence, disputed and otherwise, he’s like, “So, did Hauptmann do it? I …

I don’t like musicals. I realize it’s ridiculous to complain that they come off stagey, but they do, and I don’t care for it.
But I do like the songs from musicals a lot of times …

William Poundstone is pretty good with a low-pH zinger. In Bigger Secrets, a book I’ve reread a hundred times thanks primarily to Poundstone’s “…seriously?” prose, he gives this account of Scientology’s handling of Hubbard’s death:
Finally …

I never get tired of the stories of the Apollo missions. Apollo 13, of course, is one of those poppy-fields movies that I can never not watch, and I think I put In the Shadow …

The title of the film refers to the LAPD Rampart scandal of the late ’90s, but the story follows a single cop, Dave Brown (Woody Harrelson), who’s trying to hold everything together by any means …

“In life, you only have to be a genius for 15 seconds.”
Despite that promising quotation towards the beginning of Candyman: The David Klein Story, and the intermittent presence of Weird Al Yankovic, the documentary is …

I give The Help sooo much credit; it won me over despite my utter determination to hate it. You can ask Couch Baron, to whom I spent a good ten minutes bitching on IM about …

I didn’t realize how tense I had gotten, physically, while watching Martha Marcy May Marlene until that last black screen. What an outstanding slow build of “can’t look”/”can’t look away” — you’d think the inciting …