Although supplying boy’s adventure thrills on the side, Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories are remarkable for how they make the process of empirical brainwork, and the resulting discoveries, breathlessly exciting. Each Holmes tale simultaneously unlocks a mystery while deepening the enigma of its hero in a miraculously sustained piece…

The movies are full of bed-hopping men — think of Humphrey Bogart’s serial flirtations in The Big Sleep (1946), and Richard Roundtree laying his way uptown and down in Shaft (1971). But in Steve McQueen’s Shame, womanizing is not just an outgrowth of the plot — it is the plot…

“I don’t think about the home where my films will land,” says Alexander Payne, free-range in a film culture fenced off into art house and multiplex, to the detriment of both. He describes the audience that he writes for as “my best friends and myself . . . Then your…

A revenge of the have-nots playing on the clear class stratification of the luxury high-rise, Tower Heist pits lobby against penthouse. Josh Kovacs (Ben Stiller) is the manager of The Tower, an exclusive apartment building on Columbus Circle (played by the Trump International, in fact). Josh’s job is to know…

Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, is the close-second candidate to be attributed authorship of the 37 plays of William Shakespeare, the glover’s son turned actor from Stratford-upon-Avon — who, due to the troublesome existence of evidence, remains the general favorite. De Vere is the protagonist of Anonymous, a…

Charlie Kenton (Hugh Jackman) is a two-bit trainer traveling the state fair circuit in a not-too-distant future. His line is robot fighting, a sport that has absorbed the audience for boxing, MMA, and, apparently, demolition derby. After a tough match leaves Charlie ‘bot-less, he gets news that his ex-girlfriend, with…

The making of a monkey activist in Rise of the Planet of the Apes. The latest descendant of the half-century old de-evolution concept that began with Pierre Boulle’s novel, Rise of the Planet of the Apes is an origin story. Predicting an ape-supremacist future, Rupert Wyatt’s film is set in…

Gunslingers battle space invaders in movie mash-up Cowboys & Aliens. We begin in classic, saddle-sore terrain. A lone stranger with a mysterious past — Daniel Craig fills the boots here — rides into a God-forsaken town in the Arizona territory. More familiar archetypes are waiting for him there: the grizzled…

Including glimpses of Sleeping Beauty in her glass coffin, the rings of Saturn, and a roadside Texas BBQ, Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life bears forth a variety of forms — and invites as many reactions. You may feel amazed or muddled, softly spoken to or simply abandoned while watching…

Something Borrowed is based on a 2005 work of chick literature by Emily Giffin. It was directed with extraordinary impersonality by Luke Greenfield (Rob Schneider’s The Animal), and produced by Hilary Swank in collaboration, apparently, with the restaurant Shake Shack — one of the lifestyle brands prominently featured in this…

“This one perfect moment.” “That soul-crushing mistress.” “Our forever night.” These and other understated definitions are obsessively applied to a certain dreaded/anticipated ritual throughout Prom, a timely pop product set in a suburban high school during the last weeks before summer break and destined for the immortality of Vitamin C’s…

A U.N. première! A Vanessa Redgrave cameo! Zionist hoodlums! Distributors the Weinstein Company and director Julian Schnabel overcome their well-documented aversion to media attention to address the Israel-Palestine question, pleading peace, compromise, and the creation of a self-governing Palestinian state. While Jewish advocacy groups swarm to Schnabel’s bait, it bears…

Set in the months after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, The Conspirator follows the consequences of the fatal shot at Ford’s Theater — specifically, the trial of Mary Surratt, Catholic, 42, and the owner of a Washington, D.C., boarding house who was presented before a military tribunal as the den mother…

There is a great deal of prowling motion in Insidious: a recurring sideways dolly outside an ominous house, a trench-coat-clad cacodemon pacing outside a second-story window. It’s the restless motion of a movie stalking its prey: you, dear viewer. A married couple, Josh and Renai (Patrick Wilson and Rose Byrne),…

Ink still wet on his MIT degree, Matt Franklin (Topher Grace) is back in hometown Los Angeles, waiting for his future to clarify itself while he loiters behind the counter at Suncoast Video, hawking VHS copies of Harry and the Hendersons because it’s, like, totally 1988. Inspiration comes when Matt…

The Farrellys dutifully fulfill their raunch and goo quotients. Rick and Fred (Owen Wilson and Jason Sudeikis) are two domesticated husbands whose long marriages (to Jenna Fischer and Christina Applegate, respectively) have achieved somnolent routine in suburban Providence, Rhode Island. Yet the wives worry. Rick is a girl watcher; Fred…

The Rite is the latest of at least a dozen widely released American movies in half as many years with demonic possession a major plot point. This doesn’t mean the subject is wrung out — its continuing resonance with audiences hasn’t been effaced by secular pop psychology or modernization within…

Just in time for the whole family to file into the multiplex on a silent Christmas night when there’s nowhere else to go: a return to the magnified dysfunction of the Focker household and the cozy glow of some paychecking celebrities. This began a decade ago in Meet the Parents,…

A massive project, taken up lightly by Disney in the giddy post-Lord of the Rings atmosphere and dropped upon failing to return the requisite billions, this third adaptation from C.S. Lewis’ seven-volume Chronicles of Narnia comes underwritten by a new studio, 20th Century Fox, and with a new director, Michael…

An orphan for all practical purposes, 12-year-old Owen (Kodi Smit-McPhee) has been left to sprout like a weed. At home, he gets sparse recognition from his divorcée mother; at school, he absorbs castrating taunts from a pack of bullies who’ve gleaned “eternal victim” from his spacey stare. Owen fills the…

Oliver Stone’s Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps doesn’t have the clean, fable-like arc of its predecessor, the tale of the Fox and the Gekko (Charlie Sheen’s upstart broker Bud, Michael Douglas’ Wall Street player Gordon). Only the buccaneer charisma of Douglas’ signature role obscured the “Clean business, clean soul” moral…