“…can still pierce a hardened heart – especially these days, when demotions and layoffs have become a daily occurrence and the streets are full of forlorn former doormen.

"A tonic to the Hollywood teacher movie."

"…not only fails to give the novel cinematic stature; it denigrates the delicate beauty of the book itself.

I wonder if Kate Winslet and her director husband Sam Mendes – who work together in the domestic drama Revolutionary Road – have ever lived in the suburbs. Separately – she in Little Children; he with American Beauty – they have made their own contributions to the familiar Hollywood genre of suburban satire. With Revolutionary

I don’t usually fall for it when an actor or actress deglams – when they get scruffy and ugly onscreen in hopes of winning an award. Yet Anne Hathaway redeems the practice in Rachel Getting Married. Hathaway doesn’t really hide her beauty here, as, say, Angelina Jolie did in A Mighty Heart or Charlize Theron

“Holding Frozen River up to traditional standards of morality doesn’t work.

“As a heroic drama, Defiance has its clichés and narrative hiccups, but as an examination of the cycle of violence it’s often harrowing.

Meryl Streep acts up a storm in Doubt, and the movie acts up right along with her. The picture, adapted by writer-director John Patrick Shanley from his play, centers on a 1960s Bronx parish seething with distrust. Sister Aloysius Beauvier (Streep), the iron-fisted principal of the parish’s school, finds herself at odds with Father Flynn

Duplicity is a movie built around dazzling dialogue, which makes it a rare and precious thing. There is banter here that could stand up to the snazziest verbal sizzle of Hollywood’s classics, in which Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell or Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert would spar to their own and the audience’s immense amusement.