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• Waltz Explodes at Cannes

  May 16, 08 2:10 PM CDT
  Now that's more like it. After a typically lousy opening—allegorical disaster Blindness—the Cannes Film Festival shook things up yesterday with Waltz with Bashir, a ferocious animated documentary from Israel recounting the 1982 massacre at Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon. It’s “stunning,” writes Manhola Dargis in the New York Times, “at once a furious act of conscience and a lament.” More »

• Applause for Reprise

  May 16, 08 11:54 AM CDT
  Joachim Trier’s debut film, the honest and amusing dramedy Reprise, is wowing critics. The film, which tells the story of a pair of young aspiring writers, “opens like a portrait of the artist as a young man (times two) and, with stealth and wit, metamorphoses into something wide and deep and funny,” writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. More »

• Speed Racer Is a Slog

  May 9, 08 11:33 AM CDT
  The Wachowski brothers’ Speed Racer is a flashy ride that would be great for kids—if it weren’t “like C-SPAN set in an arcade,” writes Carina Chocano in the Los Angeles Times. Endless, aimless dialog, she says, dominates the “juvenile and hermetic” pastiche about a Grand Prix driver avenging his brother's death in a futuristic world that looks like the inside of a pinball machine.  More »

• Iron Man Solid Gold

  May 1, 08 5:30 PM CDT
  Iron Man rockets into theaters tomorrow, and it’s so good it “practically dares the competition to measure up,” Peter Travers writes in Rolling Stone. Critics are nearly unanimous in praising the latest superhero flick, admiring its “raw vitality” and “pitch-perfect casting.” Robert Downey Jr., in particular, “brings so much creative juice to the party that Iron Man achieves instant liftoff.” More »

• People Not Smart Enough

  Apr 11, 08 1:45 PM CDT
  Critics like the big-name actors in family serio-comedy Smart People —especially Dennis Quaid, who stars as a cranky professor with much to learn about people—but think they might have been smarter to choose a different script. Screenwriter Mark Jude Poirier "is aiming for Scrabulous dialogue but his movie is barely of Boggle quality," Carrie Rickey writes in the Philadelphia Inquirer. More »