I can recall how when “Apocalypse Now” first came out, viewers almost universally loathed the ending. After the forward motion of the first two hours, the film seemed to just run out of steam; Brando’s shadowy rambling seemed an anticlimax, and reports that Francis ...

What is progress? The powers that be espouse an almost religious belief in ever-increasing wealth, productivity and technological advances. But what if these things come at the expense of the long-term habitability of the planet? Unlimited economic progress is impossible on a planet of ...

Quick review: This is the zaniest, sharpest animated film I’ve seen since “The Incredibles.” I thought there might be a reason for that, and sure enough, director Rich Moore — like Brad Bird of “The Incredibles” — is a joke-writing alumnus of “The Simpsons” ...

‘The nature of our immortal lives lies in the consequences of our actions.” Thus spake Sonmi-451, a Fabricant, one of many identical cloned slaves in the post-eco-apocalyptic future depicted in “Cloud Atlas,” the phenomenal new film codirected by Lana and Andy Wachowski of “The ...

It takes some weird alignment of the stars to produce a best picture Oscar-winner that is also No. 1 on my annual Top 10, but Ben Affleck’s “Argo” was that flick. There’s been a bit of a critical backlash against this film, as if ...

Oliver Stone’s first hit as a director was “Salvador,” way back in 1986, which looked at a small Latin American nation’s descent into political murder, funded mostly by its larger neighbor to the north. Now, with “Savages,” he seems to have come full circle, ...

It’s a scene we’ve seen in so many other movies: Two soldiers, in full dress uniform, arrive on some leafy suburban street and knock on a door. “We regret to inform you ma’am” is usually about how far they get into their message before ...

There’s a moment in “Oz the Great and Powerful,” Disney’s much-anticipated prequel to the 1939 MGM classic “The Wizard of Oz,” where a character falls to the floor, in the midst of a witchy transmogrification into something evil. Off-screen she remains until suddenly, with ...

Way back in 1992 there appeared a hot new indie flick called “Reservoir Dogs” by a then-unknown video-rental clerk turned director called Quentin Tarantino. This newcomer’s knack was to take a classic genre movie — the heist flick — and pump it full of ...

Todd Solondz never makes comfortable films, and “Dark Horse” is no exception, featuring as its protagonist an overweight, overbearing 30-something nebbish named Abe (Jordan Gelber) who’s a toy-collector nerd and still living at home with his parents. Classic comedy-loser material, in other words, but ...

Director: Temujin Doran Language: English Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent who left the New York Times after it censured him for voicing opposition to the Iraq war. “Open,” a documentary based on Hedges’ book “Death of the Liberal Class,” is composed of ...

You’re fed up with your family, your upbringing, your school, your social class. You don’t fit in and are reminded of it. The rules and social norms that other people seem to follow so blindly seem to you phony, trite, suffocating. You develop an ...