Guy Ritchie’s calculations in his sequel Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows are so low-down they’re almost diabolical. He has retooled the famous fictional detective character with no resp more

You can’t get your mind off Lady Gaga while watching David Fincher’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Gaga, the ubiquitous pop star summoned up by the same self-loathing zeitgeist that pop more

Brian DePalma’s 1996 Mission Impossible was a cartoon even though he didn’t direct it like one. The sheer, exhilarating pleasure of Mission Impossible IV (officially subtitled Ghost Protoc more

Count Our Idiot Brother among Paul Rudd’s poor choices—a select group of dumb to unbearable films including The Shape of Things, Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Dinner for Schmucks that waste the actor’s estimable gifts. Rudd’s commitment to playing off-center characters who combine nerdiness with idiosyncratic charm has made him a new kind of romantic comedian. He takes the Cary Grant mantel into the post-feminist era, where masculinity shades easily into non-aggressive, quasi-gay traits—the hallmarks of Rudd’s best characterizations in I Love You Man, Role Models, Diggers and Clueless. more

Graphic artist Joann Sfar makes a bold directorial debut with Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life by bringing his own artistic personality to bear upon this tribute to Serge Gainsbourg, the French recording artist/roué who has become a hipster icon. For Sfar, Gainsbourg (born Lucien Ginsberg) is foremost an icon of French Jewish identity. One of the first of the film's many animated sequences is "THE JEW AND FRANCE" poster announcing Sfar's underlying theme, as in his graphic novel The Rabbi's Cat. more

Through six short stories about life under the Ceausescu regime, Tales from the Golden Age returns Romanian director Cristian Mungiu to the period of trauma. Less the source of inspiration, the Ceausescu era has become a pathological obsession for Romanian filmmakers (four more—Ioana Uricaru, Hanno Höfer, Razvan Marculescu and Constantin Popescu—were conscripted by Mungiu to direct the separate episodes here, all written by him) and for Western film critics who enjoy stales of political oppression to indulge their own paranoid fantasies. more

One Day resembles another recent fatuous love story, (500) Days of Summer, in the way it forces a dull-toannoying couple's romantic game-playing upon audiences. Emma and Dexter (Anne Hathaway and Jim Sturgess) meet at university in 1986 London and over the course of 20 years become lovers, then a married couple. She wants to be a poet but lacks confidence and money; he's a naturally glib, rich-boy gadabout who finds early success as a TV host but no life purpose. more

It’s perfect coincidence that the comedy 30 Minutes or Less opens the same week as Spike Jonze’s music video for the controversial Jay-Z and Kanye West song “Otis” is released. Together they usefully gauge how Americans judge behavior, success and the mixed-up values of post-9/11 masculinity. more

As a piece of entertainment, The Help succeeds where Tyler Perry's For Colored Girls failed: this comic melodrama is geared to please a broad audience by contrasting the experiences of black and white women in 1960s America, just before the Civil Rights Act and the popularity of feminism. Sisterhood is shown as a circumstance of different but shared sacrifices based on gender, but controlled by race and class. more

More than a prequel, better than a reboot, Rise of the Planet of the Apes is the most exciting installment of that series since its beginning in 1968 and—are you ready?—it is easily the best American movie of this corrupted summer. Rise succeeds on modest B-movie terms (terms confused by Hollywood’s blockbuster mentality, where action-exploitation films now carry the weight of exorbitant budgets, studio expectations and adolescent notions of prestige). Director Rupert Wyatt brings glory back to the B movie. more