A big-bang demolition derby, J.J. Abrams’ much-anticipated, greatly enjoyable Super 8 seems bound for box-office glory. Opening three weeks before July 4, this Steven Spielberg-produced, kid-centric 21st-century disaster flick could well hang in at theaters till the 10th anniversary of 9/11 — an event that haunts Abrams’ surefire blockbuster nearly…

Greatly expanded from a four-page, single-situation story by Raymond Carver, Dan Rush’s first feature Everything Must Go is an ambitious if enervated vehicle for Will Ferrell — playing it straight as Nick Halsey, a middle-class drunk fired from his job and locked out of his suburban home by an irate,…

CANNES, FRANCE — The last-day screening of Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s ruminative, challenging Once Upon a Time in Anatolia strengthened an exceptionally ambitious and coherent competition at this year’s Cannes Film Festival — although Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life won the Palme d’Or, Ceylan’s late entry shared the second place…

CANNES, FRANCE — Midway through the Cannes Film Festival, the competition has been all about family — more specifically all about parents (and parent surrogates) and their troubled children, many of both types pretty much from hell. Brad Pitt seems a good bet for red-carpet glory as the domineering autocrat…

An earnest, intermittently droll dramedy about a manic-depressive toy manufacturer and his bewildered family, The Beaver is a parable that’s not easily parsed. While director Jodie Foster fails to maintain a consistent tone — could there be such a thing as inspirational satire? — the movie’s lopsided wobble is undeniably…

This week’s big movie may be found on TV. Arch-independent filmmaker Todd Haynes makes a characteristically sidelong move toward the mainstream with his five-part miniseries Mildred Pierce, which starts this Sunday on HBO. Haynes, the most academic yet mass-culture-minded of U.S. indie directors, began his career in the late Reagan…

Fresh from Sundance, Miguel Arteta’s amiable Cedar Rapids is a mild comedy of embarrassment, set in the dark heart of Middle America and starring sitcom secondario Ed Helms (The Office’s obnoxious angry salesman Andy Bernard) as Tim Lippe, a prematurely middle-aged man-child. Taking an airplane for the first time in…

The Eagle, directed by Kevin Macdonald and adapted from Rosemary Sutcliff’s 1954 historical novel, The Eagle of the Ninth, a bestselling tale of second-century Roman legions and youthful derring-do on the far side of Hadrian’s Wall, is a thunderous boys’ adventure of the old-school type — there’s not a female…

Only inertia will bring people to Michel Gondry’s 3-D spectacle, The Green Hornet. Opening amid persistent negative buzz in the mid-January dead zone, this long-germinating prospective franchise, based on a character that first saturated the nation’s radio waves in 1939, seems pretty much DOA — although in the absence of…

Many of my favorite films of the year are still awaiting wider release, so although this top 10 list wraps up my 2010, it can also serve as a guide to your 2011. My number one film, in fact, sneaks into New York just three days before the year ends:…

Boldly reanimating the comic Western that secured John Wayne his Oscar 41 years ago, the Coen brothers’ True Grit is well-wrought if overly talkative and seriously ambitious. Opening with a strategically abbreviated Old Testament proverb (“The wicked flee when none pursueth”), the film returns the Coens to the all-American sagebrush…

The Fighter is based on the true story of Lowell, Massachusetts light welterweight champ “Irish” Micky Ward, but, starring Boston working-class hero Mark Wahlberg, it plays as a Rocky-fied fairy tale for our time: Consigned to Palookaville, a sweet, unassuming boxer with more heart than brains steps up — all…

A picnic for Anglophiles, The King’s Speech is a well-wrought, enjoyably amusing inspirational drama that successfully humanizes, even as it pokes fun at, the House of Windsor. The story — shy young prince is helped by irascible wizard to break an evil spell and lead his nation to glorious victory…

Jeff Bridges is God and, as image-captured from the original 1982 Tron, he’s also the devil in Disney’s mega-million-dollar reboot, Tron: Legacy. The notion of a tragically split persona might have been scripted to give the new movie a measure of emotional gravitas, but why bother with writing when Tron:…

A near-irresistible exercise in bravura absurdity, Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan deserves to become a minor classic of heterosexual camp — at the very least, it’s the most risible and riotous backstage movie since Showgirls. Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake has had a spooky quality at least since Tod Browning appropriated a few…

“I was recently sitting with a group of French directors, and at a certain point, the conversation turned to Fred Wiseman,” critic Kent Jones wrote eight years ago in Film Comment. “Without hesitation, everyone agreed that he was probably America’s greatest living filmmaker . . .” — not to mention…

Comely, independent, willful young lass returns to collect family inheritance in rural England, drives the local men wild, makes several misalliances, and inadvertently precipitates a catastrophe before nature finally takes its course. Adapted from Posy Simmonds’ excellent graphic novel, Tamara Drewe knowingly updates Thomas Hardy’s gloomy pastoral Far From the…

Inside Job, Charles Ferguson’s follow-up to his Iraq War gut-twister No End in Sight, is a documentary that inspires less shock and awe than sickening ire. The movie opens with the cautionary tale of little Iceland, an idyllic nation so stable that, as put by one local, it enjoyed “almost…

Life is wonderful, death is wow, chance is weird, and Clint Eastwood’s Hereafter is a puddle of tepid ick. Is America’s last cowboy icon prospecting for more Oscar gold? Taking for his map an original screenplay by British docu-dramatist Peter Morgan (The Queen, Frost/Nixon), Eastwood rides a sleepy burro deep…

Published five years ago, Kazuo Ishiguro’s massively praised Never Let Me Go is set in an alternate universe where life has been extended and catastrophic illness eliminated, thanks to an evolutionary advance, namely the harvesting of vital organs from specially bred human clones. But that’s backstory. Despite its lurid premise,…

The Social Network is a wonderful title, at once Olympian in its detachment and self-descriptive in its buzz. Everyone will opine (and Tweet) on this Scott Rudin-produced, Aaron Sorkin-scripted, David Fincher-directed, universally anticipated tale of Facebook’s genesis and founding genius — at least until something sexier comes along. The main…

Lebanon, written and directed by Samuel Maoz, is not just the year’s most impressive first feature but also the strongest new movie of any kind I’ve seen in 2010. Actually, Lebanon — which won the Golden Lion at Venice, after being rejected by Berlin and Cannes — hardly seems like…