Ever since Mars Attacks!, Tim Burton mostly has been in the adaptation business, rendering dark and becurlicued Sleepy Hollows, Alice in Wonderlands, and Charlie and the Chocolate Factorys. With Frankenweenie, he adapts his own work — the first animated short he ever produced for a major film studio, and the…

You’ve Been Trumped, directed by Anthony Baxter, is a document of a humble American businessman who, through some perspicacity and Abe Lincoln-style bootstraps-hoisting, wins the land and homes of a bunch of primitive, chattering Scottish natives who obviously don’t use them to God’s and Ayn Rand’s intended purpose: for playing…

Weddings make such bitchin’ film scenarios because the stakes are believably high: If anything goes wrong, social opprobrium, the loss of your beloved, or both can ensue, right in front of your disdainful parents, the clergy, and probably Vince Vaughn or somebody. Directors have placed every obvious symbol of holy…

Remember way back when Bridesmaids was released, and Manohla Dargis referred to it as “unexpectedly funny”? (It’s amazing what still survives the editorial gauntlet at The New York Times). And then a couple of months ago, podcast host Adam Carolla cast his douchey feelings into words regarding women’s inferior capacity…

In Woody Allen’s new film, To Rome With Love, people — like, really young people — still talk, improbably, about “neuroses.” Horny, middle-age businessmen actually stand around the water cooler and ogle the hot secretary, as in the Playboy cartoons of the ancients. In the Allen Legendarium, Freudian psychiatrists never…

The spider becomes a man — and a joy — in The Amazing Spider-Man. The Amazing Spider-Man, an inexcusably good reboot from director Marc Webb, celebrates the heartwarming arachno-genetic bar mitzvah in which a boy becomes a spider and a spider becomes a man, a rite of passage last observed…