The ghostwriter encounters all manner of trouble, including the chance to sleep with a beautiful, vulnerable, angry woman. “Bad idea,” he tells himself in his bathroom mirror. And you, who’ve seen Chinatown, can only mutter, “No kidding.” Read more>>

The lawmen facing off with guns incarnate the film’s broader dilemma pretty much exactly: who is crazy here, those who have been made irresponsible by disease or those who won’t take responsibility for the devastation they wreak? Read more>>

Burning women, bloody women, women waifish and sensual, emaciated and menacing. U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) is haunted by all of them in “Shutter Island.” Read more>>

While Grover is loyal and intelligent and even, on occasion, right, he is also the film’s resident black kid, reduced to vernacular and other stereotyping, like being more sexually experienced than the white boy he’s assigned to “protect.” Read more>>

D13 Ultimatum is not subtle. It is, instead, boisterous and noisy and in its way, joyous, its political backdrop merely an occasion for more parkour. Read more>>

Like most recent films from the Luc Besson producing machine, this one is filled with silly asides Read more>>

As the first images of the film emphasize—a series of close-ups that show Avery lacing up her running shoes and zipping up her jacket—she is a track star, hoping for a scholarship to go to college. She’s also a young woman trying to sort out, as she writes to her birth mother, “who I am and where I come from.” Read more>>

The movie doesn’t exactly care about Beth’s career ambitions—why she’s good at what she does or why she likes doing it. Suffice it to say, as she does more than once, that she’s looking for a man she can love more tan her job. Read more>>

Tommy Craven (Mel Gibson) is mad. You know because he furrows his brow, stares into space, slams bad guys through walls, and shoots at oncoming cars without even thinking of ducking. Read more>>

Weighed down by clichés and that terrible dialogue (not to mention a tinkly-piano score that soon becomes intrusive), Extraordinary Measures proceeds from one event to another, in an order that goes something like this: setback-triumph-setback-triumph-setback-triumph. Read more>>