ESPN Search

Even by the standards of "indie-voice-of-a-generation" cinema, director Richard Linklater has achieved a unique adjectival status. When you sit down to watch a Linklater film, you can know exactly what that means without having any idea what you're i...

So here I am semi-live-blogging the Ender's Game trailer. Why? Call it the triumph of hope against my surefire knowledge that Hollywood would love to do nothing more than transmute every childhood memory I once held dear into a printing press that co...

Pretty much the one thing I remember from Quantum of Solace (which is, let's be honest, by far the most forgettable Daniel Craig Bond film) is Ukrainian model/actress Olga Kurylenko striding across the desert in a designer ball gown. Seeing as roughl...

Ever since his bad-police magnum opus Training Day, director Antoine Fuqua has specialized in taking totally implausible, big-budget action movies and making them plausible: an Arthurian myth grounded in Roman history; an elite gunman who avenges a C...

If, like me, you've watched your share of traffic-accident-bad Lifetime movies, then I bet you too have longed for a wandering zombie to spice up those hackneyed SWF plots and excessive use of Aaron Spelling children. Well, this week's Walking Dead e...

Preamble in Which I Beg for Mercy: Before I begin this week's recap, pardon me, merciful readers, if I flash my TWD creds in the hope that slathering myself with zombie bona fides will let me pass (relatively) unscathed through the hordes of Walkin...

If, like me, you've ruminated deeply on The Watch billboards dotting L.A.'s landscape, you've come to appreciate the subtler manifestations of irony in movie advertising. Yes, at first glance, there's nothing special about The Watch's outdoor marketi...

Don Winslow's on the kind of roll that'd make other crime writers want to fold him up in a cement sofa bed next to Jimmy Hoffa. Not only is his critically beloved New York Times best seller Savages getting the full Hollywood treatment as a film by Ol...

I'll admit to something embarrassing as a writer: I'd never heard of the word "twee" until I started seeing it in reviews of Wes Anderson's latest films sometime post–The Royal Tenenbaums. Since then, I've noticed it's the bon mot of choice for...

One perk of writing about Whit Stillman: You get to use words you haven't seen since your Saturday-morning SAT prep course. Like "raffinated," i.e., the distilled quality of his characters' dialogue as they bandy off-the-cuff insights and fragile emo...

Among my growing list of signs the Mayans are probably right about 2012 - in addition to a Harvard-educated Asian American Christian taking the NBA by storm - would have to be Pixar's omission from the Best Animated Film Oscar nominees. Sure, pointin...

Texas A&M can overcome a decade of football futility with a Cotton Bowl victory.