Directed by: Benh Zeitlin Beasts of the Southern Wild is an example of what is happening in the Academy Awards since the Academy expanded its Best Picture nominations from five to a possible ten: the small independent film that many people really like now often gets a...

Directed by: Ben Affleck Argo, the Academy Award winner for Best Picture in a year that may be the best year for nominees since the famous 1939 awards, which featured Gone With the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, Stagecoach, et al., describes an historical footnote to the...

Directed by: Paul Thomas Anderson The “R” rating of The Master is well-deserved. Filled with the sexual aberrations, the drunken philosophizing, and the bizarre activities of The Cause and its leader Lancaster Dodd, P.T. Anderson’s exposé of the cultic mind, seen...

Directed by: Tom Hooper Very few people I know in the English speaking West know nothing of Les Misérables, the magnificent stage musical turned into film last year by the immensely talented Tom Hooper. Hooper knows how to present period pieces to a 21st century...

Directed by: David O. Russell The “making of” documentary bound with the Blu-ray version of Silver Linings Playbook is subtitled: “The Movie That Became A Movement”. The movement is the current American interest in a malady suffered by the main character, Patrick,...

Directed by: Steven Spielberg Lincoln is a Steven Spielberg production documenting the last months of our 16th president’s life with a focus on the political ins and outs of the passage of the Constitution’s 13th Amendment abolishing slavery. When it was released in...

Directed by: Spike Jonze Her begins with four digital, metallic tones, seemingly reflecting two very different themes and directions the movie might appropriate: tradition and deeply conservative human values since the four tones remind one of the opening to...

Directed by: Darren Aronofsky Anyone who goes to see Noah expecting to see the story the way it is usually taught in the Sunday Schools of America will be sorely disappointed. This is not your flannelgraph Noah, and it’s not your flannelgraph God. What Noah is,...

Directed by: Steve McQueen No one can argue that 12 Years a Slave was a worthy winner of the Academy Award for Best Picture this year. The production values were superb. The movie’s direction, its cinematography, its editing, its sets and costumes, its make-up—all...

Directed by: Mark Romanek In a year in which Scarlett Johansson has made no less than three movies where she portrays either a disembodied operating system (Her), an alien (Under the Skin) or a human with super-charged mental powers (Lucy), all of which explore what...