Film + TV

Ultimate fighting isn’t the obvious choice to save a school’s arts program, but Here Comes the Boom doesn’t let its head (or fists) get in the way of its heart. A lunkheaded biology teacher at an underfunded elementary, star Kevin James struggles to find a way to raise $50,000 after budget cuts threaten the music […]

Irish playwright Martin McDonagh, who made his feature film debut with the excellent In Bruges, shifts focus to the sunny, meta-textual hills of Hollywood with the fiendish Seven Psychopaths. A neurotic Colin Farrell plays a screenwriter named Martin, attempting to finish a script for which he only has a title (“Seven Psychopaths”). Figuring it out […]

You might know “barfi” as an Indian dessert, but in Anurag Basu’s romantic comedy, Barfi!, it’s the name of one of the movie’s central characters (played by Ranbir Kapoor), a man with a speech-impediment who can’t pronounce his real name, Murphy. Instead of picking a directorial style, Basu includes Charlie Chaplin-style slapstick, choppy cuts and […]

A one-hit writer of true crime novels moves his family into the house of a murdered family and learns you probably shouldn’t do that in the underachieving Sinister. When weathered author Ethan Hawke discovers a mysterious box of home movies in his new attic, he begins to unravel a series of brutal massacres across the […]

Teenage life is melodramatic enough, and for Stephen Chbosky, it’s even more traumatic in The Perks of Being a Wallflower (based on his novel of the same title), a coming-of-age story of a group of suburban high school students. Charlie (Logan Lerman), a freshman struggling with depression, befriends Sam (Emma Watson) and her stepbrother, Patrick […]

The 1% don’t exactly get what’s coming to them in the sharp corporate thriller, Arbitrage. A smartly cast Richard Gere plays hedge funder Robert Miller, who’s on the precipice of selling his illegally over-inflated company to a rival when a car accident leaves his mistress dead and threatens everything he’s lied and cheated for. Covering […]

Joe was just a low-level assassin for the future mob, a “looper” who waits at a specific place to shotgun some unlucky fellow sent back through time. That is until the target that shows up is his future self. A staggering chase begins with the mob trying to kill Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), Joe trying to […]