Since the halfwitty Damsels in Distress wants to have it both ways, its satire is about as cutting as a plastic knife through a porterhouse.

Playing a character that's almost entirely unsympathetic, Gere demonstrates the outward charm that's allowed Miller to accumulate his wealth and status, as well as the abyss-staring soul his showmanship conceals.

[Booth:] An idea that Ira tossed around a lot to me when I was working on this character was control...to find those places where you could be possessively loving of someone and do it because you care about them but also...to protect yourself.

This psychodrama of ill-advised behavior may well leave you feeling dirty...for what you've watched helplessly and perhaps for what you've countenanced as an American citizen.

A fairly straightforward yarn with bluntly articulated themes of Regret, Guilt, Misplaced Trust, and the Vagaries of Fate.

An anti-musical...based on The Who's 1973 "rock opera" concept album...all the more brilliant for this seemingly counter-intuitive approach.

It's good that Sons of Anarchy has pointed itself more clearly in the direction of an end game, as narrative wheel-spinning doesn't serve the show well.

Film demonstrably isn't the best medium for this story...but [it] remains resonant, with its hidden-in-plain-sight metaphor of drifting unconsciously through life.

Tough-minded...In recounting 'the Great Franklin County Moonshine Conspiracy,' Lawless does not lack for local color and local legend.

Imagine The Manchurian Candidate as a television series, and you have a pretty good idea of what you're in for with Showtime's paranoid thriller Homeland, adapted from the Israeli drama Hatufim (a.k.a. Prisoners of War)

The reach for epic status sets Once Upon a Time apart; one hopes that reach will result in more grasp during the upcoming sophomore season.

Eighty-eight minutes of sublime silliness...should appeal in equal measure to adults as to children.

A sensitive and fairly subtle work, with the deceptive simplicity of a well-honed short story.

Above all, Farhadi’s parable teaches that a rush to judgment inevitably turns back on the judge.

It's easy to root for Bernard and Bianca...The sequel also tweaks the formula with a brisker pace, and development of the leading characters...

Cold-staring with a black, reflective visor, a robot helps a fading old man to see life, and himself, more clearly.

Yee-haw, and so forth.

Decide for yourself if the narration is a necessary concession for kids: it's a take-it-or-leave-it proposition that doesn't make but also doesn't quite break Chimpanzee.

It's hard to excuse the reconception of the eleven or twelve-year-old Pocahontas...as a statuesque supermodel, especially as kids don't need their stories to be hung on romance to deem them, err, shapely.

If The Hunger Games on screen doesn't exactly catch fire (as does its hero Katniss Everdeen), its savvy pop culture mash-up and the charge of teens in life-and-death peril remain intact.

Cohen's act wears thin...still, The Dictator has several memorable moments...

Proves that even the studio's halfhearted larks still have life in them, thanks to golden-age animators...tunesmiths...and vocal talent.

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.

A kinder, gentler divorce comedy...Jones' commitment to portraying Celeste at least as much for her flaws as her strengths winds up making the character more likeable.

Despite the dirty jokes hidden in plain sight ('Never underestimate the power of the Schwartz!'), Spaceballs is a PG-rated comedy that makes silliness sublime.

Anyone allergic to high-fructose corn syrup might do well to stay away, but the winking humor and musical gusto of this pop-artful camp standard-bearer still carry the day.

The show has meandered back over too-familiar ground in its fifth and sixth seasons, stalling for time when it should be daringly advancing its storyline.

Plays dated these days, though what now seems like a pitch straight down the middle probably seemed more like a screwball fifty-two years ago.

[Fell:] I think this is probably the most ambitious stop-frame project. I mean, you know, it’s all hand-made. You don’t get anything for free. Everything is built. Every blade of grass is cut by hand by somebody and constructed...

[Jones:] You read a lot of screenplays, and you read some that are pretty damn good and then you read some that are not so good. And you wonder if anybody’s even heard it out loud. And I think you think, you know, 'I can do this'...

[Edgerton:] Being an onscreen parent is definitely a responsibility because kids, where I come from—it really can spin their life out of control...

Friedkin’s pretty shrewd himself, in how he teases out the humor without indulging Letts’ immature glibness, and how he sidesteps Bible Belt baptism to waterboard us in the sewer of selfish human nature.

There’s a weirdly riveting intensity—and a palpable sense of privilege—to the way the movie takes us into squirmy private moments...

If Clue falls a bit short of the mark, it remains a likeable artifact of talented people giving a ridiculous task the old college try...

You know, for kids! Best to repeat that mantra-style if you’re an adult sitting down to watch 1964’s kiddie flick The Incredible Mr. Limpet.

Kubrick again turns his unsparing eye to the dread of existence...of a godless universe...of moral frailty and civilization gone wrong...

[Chandrasekhar:] The props people came up with the just perfect melons, and photographed them in a way that, you know, you really want to go at 'em a little bit.

In a time of mind-numbing rom coms, Ruby Sparks uses fantasy to get real about modern romance.

Stranger than fiction...simply by presenting us with the facts as they unfolded, Layton winningly encourages more questions than answers.

I realized early on that all of us were capable of good and evil. That it’s within all of us. And that’s how I approach the stories I do.

The movie is, in a lot of ways, a product of just a very extensive investigation, of just kind of hanging around seeing what was going to happen.

'A boy and his dog' is a storytelling trope that goes back for centuries, but there's never been a 'boy and his dog' story quite like Wilfred.

[Jaglom:] The best advice anybody gave a young filmmaker was delivered by Orson Welles.

My first experiences of love relationships were experiences where I felt like I was walking into just a land mine of preconceived notions.

[Mike Okuda:] I grew up watching the Apollo moon landings...and the amazing things that the astronauts and the nation did, going boldly and doing it for the benefit of all humanity...here is this television show that embodied that. That was just so cool.

The shakedown cruise of Star Trek: The Next Generation—may have been a bumpy one, but it got the newest incarnation of the U.S.S. Enterprise into action while winning over the 'Trekker' fanbase at large.

[Nolan:] These are larger-than-life characters, and I very much enjoyed tapping into the sort of operatic sensibility of that...naturally from that you’re aiming for a sort of mythic status.

[Murphy:] I was fascinated by...how intelligent people would set aside logic and reason and rational thought because they just needed to believe.

Chris Nolan coming on board...just the fact that they'd asked him to do it meant that they didn't want the same thing that we'd seen before, which is what I was interested in, creating something completely new.

Taking into consideration the ego and the vanity of this species of ours, I believe that a zucchini is also one-of-a-kind, and that there’s nothing more intelligent than vegetation because it simply is, and that’s all life is about: being.