For all the Fox News fear-mongering that Hollywood is out to indoctrinate us with liberal values, when it comes to pregnancy, the movies have for years been curiously conservative. If a woman gets knocked up, she either loses the baby by accident (cue waterworks) or carries it to term (cue…

When Phil Lord and Chris Miller pitched their idea for a 21 Jump Street movie, a film everyone thought was, at best, a moronic moneymaker, they had one bold proposal: “What if the twist is that we try to make it really good?” says Lord. “That’s basically a summary of…

In 1986, peaceniks were mad at Tom Cruise. That year, the Navy thanked Top Gun for boosting enlistment another 20,000 recruits. Since then, he’s made more critiques of military than advertisements, most of which (Lions for Lambs, Born on the Fourth of July, The Last Samurai, Valkyrie) j’accuse bad leadership…

Boil Maleficent down to one newt’s nose-size piece of advice and you’d get this: Don’t dump Angelina Jolie. It’s not a problem most mortals will face, but as seen through director Robert Stromberg’s lens, the antlered arch-villain of Sleeping Beauty is a sympathetic scorned woman, equal parts Gloria Gaynor, Princess…

We’re still adjusting to Seth MacFarlane as a big-screen star. Not just because his breakneck absurdist humor often demands viewers pause and rewind, but because the man himself looks like a hand-inked cartoon, with his black hair, pupil-less eyes and an alabaster baby face that, lacking cheekbones that could carve…

James McAvoy knows not to trust the British tabloids. While flogging his grotty drama Filth, based on the Irvine Welsh novel about a coke-addicted, double-crossing cop, they breathlessly reported that the Scottish actor had dived so deep into method acting that he’d convinced a German hooker to punch him in…

It was Jason Tugman’s first day of work. Almost a decade later, he still remembers the screams. A former circus fire-eater, he’d taken a job as a lighting technician for The Oprah Winfrey Show after burning off a chunk of his tongue. The pay was $32 an hour and he…

Let’s rewind 20 years, to the summer of 1994. O.J. Simpson has been arrested for murder, the World Cup is in America and being ignored, and the biggest hits at the multiplex are Forrest Gump, The Lion King, True Lies and Speed. Notice anything odd about those movies? There’s not…

America’s sweetheart Jennifer Lawrence truly can do anything. In the course of three months, she’s managed to graciously lose an Oscar (her third nomination in four years), swan above the mansplaining condescension of a male pundit who tsk-tsked her for getting drunk in public, and burst into the summer blockbuster…

A romance ripped from the pages of Deuteronomy, Frank Coraci’s Blended posits that the best reason for a woman with sons and a man with daughters to get married is that they can take care of each other’s kids. Quel pragmatisme! In the world of this sitcom love story, men…

Chef, the back-to-his-roots indie flick from Jon Favreau (Iron Man), is to modern foodie culture as his own Swingers is to ’90s swing revival. Favreau plays Carl Casper, a culinary bad boy, barreling egotist and divorced father with a chef’s knife tattoo stretching down his right forearm and “El Jefe”…

Tom Hiddleston can pull off extreme looks. In The Avengers, he strutted around in Loki’s 2-foot horned helmet. For Midnight in Paris, he finessed F. Scott Fitzgerald’s prim finger waves. And in his latest, Jim Jarmusch’s vampire romance Only Lovers Left Alive, Hiddleston lounges bare-chested in velvet-cuffed robes. The only…

Everything in the opening scenes of Jeremy Saulnier’s nerve-wracking revenge drama Blue Ruin is the color of a bruise, from the ocean to the bullet-hole-pocked 1996 Pontiac Bonneville that homeless near-mute Dwight (Macon Blair) calls home. It’s fitting. Dwight has never overcome the pain of his parents’ murder when he…

Nicholas Stoller’s hilarious Neighbors splashes into summer with the satisfying swish-plop-hooray of a winning beer pong serve, making the director, who also wrote March’s Muppets Most Wanted, the first filmmaker in history to simultaneously have in theaters both a kiddie flick and an R-rated comedy where two men sword-fight with…

When Wally Pfister won an Oscar for Inception, his sixth film with Christopher Nolan, he went home and put the statuette on his mantel. “And then it moved to the corner, and then my office, and then the closet because you go away for a few months, and then it…

Going bald is the best thing that ever happened to Jude Law. Britain’s prettiest export did the best he could with his burden of good looks. He played a genetic ideal in Gattaca, a robotic ideal in A.I. Artificial Intelligence and in The Talented Mr. Ripley, his golden god perfection…

A grave has been freshly dug in the opening shot of director Gareth Evans’ ultra-violent Indonesian flick The Raid 2. It’s a start, but Evans is going to need 400 more. In the first few minutes, Evans dispenses with three-quarters of the survivors of 2012’s The Raid: Redemption, the writer-director’s…

“I’ve interviewed a lot of nasty characters over the years,” says a cheerful Errol Morris over lunch on a bright Los Angeles day. “I’m a connoisseur of bullshit.” He’s sampled some of the finest: Holocaust deniers, murderers swearingtheir innocence, a beauty queen who claims she only kidnapped and raped that…

Let’s start with the ending, the closing credits disclaimer that insists that none of the lead actors in Lars von Trier’s two-part erotic epic Nymphomaniac filmed penetrative sex. If there is real sex in the movie, and it sure looks like there is, it must have been the duty of…

Tucked into a pocket of his workout sweats, Steve Rogers — aka Captain America, the serum-enhanced Yankee Doodle Dynamo who’s spent the last six decades in deep freeze — keeps a notebook of cultural beats he’s missed: Star Wars, Marvin Gaye, Thai food. If only he’d added ’70s conspiracy thrillers…

Dystopian movies don’t have to make sense. As the audience, we’re obligated to sit down with our popcorn and soda and pretend that yes, of course, in the future monkeys rule the earth, women can’t bear children, and Arnold Schwarzenegger is an everyday construction worker. It’s a mutual contract of…

Think adapting War and Peace is hard? Try adapting the race car video game Need for Speed. Tolstoy’s 1,225-page behemoth has nothing on the Electronic Arts franchise’s irreconcilably complicated 20-year, 20-installment history: Sometimes cars are subject to physics; sometimes they aren’t. Sometimes they’re invulnerable; sometimes they break. Maybe you’re in…