Liz Taylor was right in her now famous Tweet about Michael Jackson’s This Is It. My Lincoln center program about MJ’s music videos (Keep Moving: Michael Jackson’s Video Art at the Walter Reade Theater, Nov. 22) was planned before This Is It, but it ought to confirm Dame Liz’s enthusiasm. It’s designed to show film enthusiasts who wonder: “What happened to the movie musical?” ...

SOMETIMES ALEXANDER SOKUROV,Werner Herzog and Pedro Almodóvar are ingenious, but their newest releases regress. Sokurov’s gorgeous bullcrap in The Sun is the definition of hagiography. He elegizes Emperor Hirohito’s deposition of his own divinity at the end of WWII as a confrontation between rationality and superstition, poetry and politics, tradition and personal expediency. Sokurov’s usual ...

Sandra Bullock brings sanity to the madness currently infecting the movie scene. Her intelligent, affecting new movie The Blind Side uses a double metaphor (alluding to both a football player’s vulnerability and racial color blindness) to dramatize how people can overcome race and class barriers to achieve their fuller humanity. Bullock’s film is upfront about the attitudes mangled and suppressed in media...

ASHLEY SPRINGER IS rapidly becoming the go-to guy for movies that require sexually explicit high school scenes. After losing his dick in 2008’s Teeth (a fantastic, underappreciated black comedy about a teenager with vagina dentata), Springer is back on screen in director Adam Salky’s Dare (based on Salky’s 2005 short, also written by David Brind), helping Emmy Rossum shed her good girl image as onet...

The 10 women—mothers, porn stars, hookers, bartenders, stewardesses, shrinks—of Sebastian Gutierrez’s interconnecting stories in Women in Trouble may not get into very inventive scrapes considering the title and the cast, but a lucky alchemy of writer and cast turns what could have been an indie bore into something surprisingly uproarious. Snagging the industry’s strongest supporting actresses...