The New Republic

"I'm sorry," the boy tells the girl whose posterior he's just whipped with some surgical tubing. "Your butt was calling to me." This assertion of anatomical enthusiasm was the second line voiced by Seth Rogen's character on "Freaks and Geeks," the critically acclaimed but short-lived NBC dramedy produced by Judd Apatow in 1999-2000. READ MORE >>

The story begins with the murder of a young man and woman in Benicia, California in December 1968. Or possibly it starts with the stabbing of a girl in Riverside in October 1966, or with the shooting of a couple in Lompoc in June 1963. It continues through a string of at least 5 brutal killings, but there may have been 13, or even as many as 37. Most perplexing of all, the story has no firm ending. The murderer is never captured or positively identified. READ MORE >>

For many years now, Tom Shales, the Washington Post's Pulitzer-winning TV critic, has displayed the kind of obsession with "Seinfeld" that Robert De Niro reserved for a teenaged Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver. Each new comedy that's launched, it seems, provides Shales with an opportunity for another unflattering comparison with his late, lamented love. As he put it earlier this year, "Every time a new sitcom is announced, some of us, giddy with optimism, wonder, 'Will this be the new "Seinfeld"?'" READ MORE >>

Cillian Murphy is a rising young actor who has delivered several fine performances of late (in Batman Begins, Red Eye, and Breakfast on Pluto, among others) and possesses arguably the most piercing blue eyes since Paul Newman. So it is a considerable surprise that, to date, his greatest contribution to cinema may be a movie he wasn't in. READ MORE >>

I hated Mel Gibson long before hating Mel Gibson was cool. In the early going, I liked him in Mad Max and in Gallipoli. I was tiring a bit of his smug machismo by the time he started grinding out Lethal Weapons, but it was Braveheart that really put me over the edge. Yes, the battle scenes were remarkable, even revelatory; but they could hardly compensate for the vainest self-directed performance ever by someone not named "Barbra Streisand," and for the movie's vicious, gratuitous homophobia. READ MORE >>

Hugh Grant once described his acting range, with typical deprecatory charm, as "sinisterly narrow." He was selling himself short: In fact, the charming Brit bears a rare gift for all forms of onscreen humility, from rueful abashment to outright self-loathing. His performances, as a rule, are extended exercises in contrition; even when he plays a self-satisfied alpha male (as in, say, the Bridget Jones movies), the promise of eventual humiliation lurks. READ MORE >>

READ MORE >>

Lather, rinse, repeat. Lather, rinse, repeat. Longtime readers may recall that I was not a fan of Spider-Man 2, a movie whose obsessive adherence to formula made it play more like a half-hearted remake of the original than a sequel. READ MORE >>

What, exactly, is Zhang Yimou trying to tell us? After years of making films about intimate oppressions that frequently got him in trouble with Chinese censors (Ju Dou, Raise the Red Lantern), in 2002 Zhang made Hero, a dazzling wire-fu epic that was also an appalling paean to authoritarianism and the "One China" policy of subjugating Tibet and Taiwan. READ MORE >>

"Cinema," Alfonso Cuarón told The Seattle Times in December, "[has] become now what I call a medium for lazy readers. ... Cinema is a hostage of narrative. And I'm very good at narrative as a hostage of cinema." He was referring to his film Children of Men, and he captured its strengths and weakness admirably. It is a frequently moving, occasionally harrowing tour de force of cinematic technique; yet it is also somehow hollow. READ MORE >>