Helen Mirren

A rubbernecker's movie....There's a new Zalman King in town, and his name is Lee Daniels.

Delicately balances the inherent drama of the tragic circumstances with the comedy of manners that is the Royal Family's dysfunction, and Britain's ambivalent attitudes to the same.

The cinematic equivalent of the guy who runs up to a cop, grabs the cop's hat, throws it to the ground and takes a shit on it. One is left a bit speechless.

Inkheart gets a pass for making books seem cool (if scary): if only it could have done the same for movies.

More infamous for its widespread ineptitude than for its artistic innovation...

Macdonald shifts the emphasis to highlight a moment when declining readership and corporate bottom lines threaten the tradition of print journalism.

Winds up feeling strangely perfunctory. This is subject matter that should fascinate, rather than deliver an occasional droll observation.

The screw-turning plot is great fodder for Hoskins and Mirren, who expertly calibrate their stressed-out character arcs.

Stars four Oscar-winning actors. It’s not every day that you’re able to use 'Helen Mirren' and 'heavy artillery' in the same sentence, but Red gives you the opportunity.

Boils down to the importance of facing up to what one can and can't live with, and taking action to set matters right...audiences will be able to recognize the secret agency in their own lives and the folly of living lies.

Taymor tries a little too hard, neither breaking nor broken by the play, but ultimately losing the wrestling match.

In its third season, Glee tenaciously held its ground as one of TV's most ambitious shows, in terms of production value and the sheer size of the ensemble it sets out to serve.

Reenactment cinema...On balance, Hitchcock is about as entertaining and as trustworthy as a tabloid.

This GMO hybrid of foodie drama, culture-clash comedy, travelogue, and romance gently establishes, in middlebrow just-go-with-it fashion, the tone of a fable.

Corny, commercial, predictably platitudinous, and tear-jerkingly weepy...also an inevitably thought-provoking dramatization of facing the "ghosts" of the past on an individual level and a national one.

Plays not as straight hagiography but rather as a portrait of a flawed hero...Cranston gives a floridly theatrical leading performance in keeping with Trumbo’s wit...

Chicken Poop for the Soul...

The Nicholas Searle novel Hatcher adapts features a shopworn story with easily anticipated plot twists, resulting in a soggy and largely pointless exercise that gets by on its consummate cast and some witty dialogue.