You can’t not like the characters that you’re writing...Even with, quote unquote, a 'bad guy.' You have to write them as if they’re making their case to God why they belong in heaven.

You really want the people you’re working with to be as great as they can be...You know, it often feels like a competition somehow. But it’s really not. That’s coming from a bad place, and it’s an illusion.

My eighteenth birthday, I was like 'Okay! I'm an adult now. I want to act!' And [my parents] were like 'Oh nooo.' They were hoping I'd forget, and I didn't. And I pursued it ever since.

I would prepare every day for ten months for a role. Now the problem with that is there’s only so much that a film role can express...I would do all this research, and then it felt to me like eighty percent of it was always just ending up nowhere.

Mostly harmless.

All about the empty spectacle, sound and fury building to multiple climaxes (without the pleasure).

Thematically adventurous...the bloody shocks that paint the town Red emerge from suburban squalor: dirty streets, dirty crimes, and dirty politicians.

May be a naively simple variation on that other George—Orwell—but it remains a dazzling triumph of creativity and style over financial limitations.

Richard Linklater brings a new novelty to a Dick adaptation: fidelity to the source.

The encoded bloom is off the digital rose in The Matrix Reloaded.

In its thirteenth year on the air, The Simpsons may have been past its prime, but it retained a keen sense of the bizarre while also recommitting to telling some family-themed stories with a more heartfelt core.

If it’s half-baked Italian modernism you’re after, you’ve come to the right place.

The picturesque romantic travelogue...is as obvious but elegant as the bit of symbolism that ends it.

[This] blend of swoony romance and horror-styled action...[isn't] shy about detonating plot twists.

A “human nature film,” a crime drama that observes cops and robbers in their natural habitat and studies their instinctual behaviors.

A humble riff on the well-worn coming-of-age film.

One of the funniest elements of Withnail & I is that it concerns three varieties of drama queen: the flamboyantly dark-minded Withnail; neurotic, ill-equipped Marwood, and the larger-than-life Monty.

A smart and imaginative fantasy with appeal for the whole family is always cause for celebration...Time Bandits rivals Roald Dahl in its surrealism and satire.

As a study of social façades as a means of social climbing, and as a character study of Hoskins' would-be angel, Mona Lisa excels...

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

After six attention-grabbing seasons on the network airwaves, Lost has turned out to be more than the sum of its parts.

Its unique oddball blend of fatalistic Hemingway-esque masculinity, swoony romance and mythology, literary allusions...and grab bag of styles...makes Pandora and the Flying Dutchman nearly as hypnotic as the romance it retells.

Darkly funny, haunting, and perhaps hopeful...there's a keen sense of absurdism (and in Agnès Godard's brilliant photography a sort of surrealist realism, if there is such a thing) in the circumstances.

I spent...three months doing ballet classes...Which is just an ass-kicking workout. And then I met a couple of dancers that had danced under him and interviewed them, and spent the evening sort of drinking wine and listening to their stories...

One is always in good hands with Thompson, even in this kiddie franchise...for the kids, there’s not only the sobering reminder that they're works in progress but also lots of...fairy-tale magic, with a touch of Babe’s farm charm.

The meetings that you have with the costume designer are just as important as the meetings you have with the director and the writer. Because you are putting this character's aesthetics together.

Brought to you by Participant Media, makers of Food, Inc. and The Cove. Next time, guys, give a hoot and don’t pollute the multiplex. Save the children.

Consummate showmanship...evidence of a huge pop idol and savvy showman with a finely tuned stage act.

The play widely regarded as the best piece of dramatic literature ever written...[in] the only unexpurgated big-screen version.

How do I find thee ridiculous, The Last Song? Let me count the ways...

Julia Roberts and voluptuous production value contribute mightily to this ultimate of wish-fulfillment tales.

The premise begs for wicked bite, but winds up poking along amiably. That’s the problem with these Joneses: it’s all too easy to keep up with them.

Much as I would prefer to see the subtler Carell of Dan in Real Life comically negotiate a struggling marriage to Fey, we’re in a land of gunfire and super-computers.

Deserves its status among sports films, but its ongoing appeal reflects that it's something more: an old-fashioned romantic comedy that succeeds in establishing and deepening memorable characters through memorably flavorful dialogue.

New York is the ghost town and Van Cleef the corrupt sheriff in Escape from New York's thinly disguised postmodern Western, with ex-soldier Russell as the anti-establishment hero who won't cotton to anyone's code but his own.

So a vampire, a werewolf, and a ghost walk into a bar...

No one is going to match Grant and Hepburn, but Ryan O'Neal and Barbra Streisand give it the ol' college try in the criminally entertaining What's Up, Doc?

The director’s shrewd and witty approach to the material demonstrates his finely tuned sense of the absurd.

Though lacking in narrative and comic sophistication, National Lampoon's Vacation has something arguably more important: built-in, instant audience identification.

Nothing's bigger than life. Life is great, right? Some aspects of life are bigger than others. Some personalities in life are bigger than others.

A welcome late-career showcase for Robert Duvall...fits snugly into the traditions of Southern literature, particularly the tensions between gentility and eccentricity, the community and the individual, and man and God.

Gallo's self-consciously overstated direction feeds the impression that he's trying to remake Goodfellas...can we all agree by now that the use of 'Sympathy for the Devil' in crime pictures ought to be outlawed?

Stylish...sitcomedic...plays it pretty safe.

The top-billed actors deliver: Hanks with his resonant reserve and Newman in conveying Rooney's failed attempt to live up to his self-image as the ultimate just and loving patriarch.

Doesn't quite click on all levels, and the story and character development feels truncated, but there's still plenty to enjoy about its weird occurrences.

I see London, I see France, I see Chevy do a dumb dance.

Seductive blend of mythology and travelogue...there's still sensual pleasure in the urban scenery, colorful visions, and music and dance, most of it defined by joyful abandon.

A fairly typical Hollywood bromantic comedy in that one suspects that the improvisatory chops of its likeable star duo made them real-time script doctors.

Nicholas Sparks-meets-Bruce Joel Rubin...The movie’s God talk (most of it coming from…Ray Liotta?) and blatant expression of theme through platitudes make this romantic melodrama as drippy as the St. Cloud boys’ eyes.

Malik’s boxed-in circumstances certainly press ethical questions for the viewer, but in Rahim’s psychologically acute performance, Malik is never less than understandable—more often than not, he’s disturbingly sympathetic.