Ian Buckwalter

It's hard to tell who seems more lost in Paul Schrader's The Canyons. There's Lindsay Lohan, who to her credit appears to at least be trying really, really hard to remember how to act naturally. (Of course, when the effort's so clearly visible, you're pretty much not succeeding.) Her character, ...

Wait, where are the falling buildings? Why is it that life on earth as we know it isn't in peril? Doesn't director James Mangold know that Summer 2013 is all-apocalypse all the time when it comes to blockbusters?

Yet here's The Wolverine, the sixth film in the X-Men franchise, in ...

There's nothing new under the marquee. And how much do we really crave the unfamiliar anyway? Last weekend a terrible sequel to a terrible comedy delivered a spanking to a much-anticipated non-sequel blockbuster — and an uncommonly good blockbuster at that. Familiarity doesn't breed contempt at the movies; ...

The simple pleasures of watching Godzilla or Ultraman doing battle on Saturday afternoon television have proved difficult to re-create since their heyday in the '70s and '80s. Big-budget Hollywood attempts to replicate the experience tend to not just be failures, but disastrous, highly polished failures on an epic scale: Roland ...

"You need to be prepared for the Kevin who comes back not to be the same Kevin."

That's what a doctor told the parents of snowboarder Kevin Pearce following the brain injury he suffered in late 2009, while training for the Vancouver Olympics.

Those words, simple but painful for a ...

Neil Jordan seems well aware that audiences may be feeling deep fatigue about vampires. So with his latest, the director of Interview With the Vampire makes a vampire film that seeks to reinvent the species, while harking back to a more classical — read: less sparkly — take on the ...

The killer's point of view is a time-honored shot in thrillers and scary movies, from cheapie slasher flicks to more artful fare like The Silence of the Lambs. What better way to heighten the horror of the kill, after all, than to make the viewer unwillingly complicit in the demise ...

Horror films are filled with the things that nightmares are supposedly made of: monsters, madmen, murder, assorted blood and guts.

But those are really just the props of nightmares — representations of the psychological terrors that really plague us: our fears about mortality, isolation, abandonment and failure. Peter Strickland's Berberian ...

The best twists in The Twilight Zone weren't the ones that came at the end. The real genius of Rod Serling's classic series was how often and how effectively it twisted things up with simple but outlandish "What if?" queries in episode setups.

These skewed perspectives on the everyday fed ...

James Marsh's Shadow Dancer opens with scenes depicting the lead ups to a pair of violent acts separated by 20 years. The events are connected, both by the involvement of Collette (Andrea Riseborough) and by the fact that guilt created by her role as a child bystander in ...

If ever there was a man who made a virtue out of failure, it was George Plimpton.

He played quarterback with the Detroit Lions without even knowing where to put his hands to take the snap. He had his nose bloodied by knockout king Archie Moore. He sweated through performances ...

By the end of What Maisie Knew, what 6-year-old Maisie knows is the thing everyone in the theater has figured out in the first five minutes: This poor little girl has two of the most horrible movie parents since Faye Dunaway got her hands on a wire hanger.

They fight ...

Early in Kon-Tiki, a dramatization of Thor Heyerdahl's famous 1947 trans-Pacific raft expedition, the Norwegian ethnographer arrives at the New York Explorers Club trying to drum up support for his crazy adventure.

Though the host initially tells him he's not welcome — Heyerdahl (Pal Sverre Hagen) has already been soundly ...

The best documentaries about filmmaking are the ones that show it at its worst.

Movie sets are fundamentally boring places, where there's mostly a lot of waiting around going on. But when disaster strikes with millions of dollars on the line, the tension and drama are suddenly amped up to ...

Let's just get this out of the way up front: Fede Alvarez's remake of Sam Raimi's horror classic The Evil Dead can't hold a candle, shotgun or revving chainsaw to the original.

Raimi's 1981 debut is a masterpiece of punk filmmaking, a bunch of young enthusiasts who barely knew what ...

It's probably best not to think of Olympus Has Fallen as a movie released in 2013. Antoine Fuqua's film — about a band of North Koreans who invade the White House — feels from start to finish like a throwback to the action cinema and military thrillers of decades past.

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In the buildup to the climax of Brad Anderson's The Call, a character discovers what the film's villain has been doing with all the teenage girls he's been kidnapping and killing. It's a grisly revelation, and it's played for shock value — both for the audience and for the character ...

Great deeds start out as current events, move on to history, and eventually, with some craft and embellishment, become folklore and legend. This process is central to the structure of Bryan Singer's Jack the Giant Slayer, which merges elements of the familiar folktale of "Jack and the Beanstalk" with the ...

Eleven climbers, all scarred in some way by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, tackle a Himalayan climb in Michael Brown's documentary.

Shut Up and Play the Hits documents the final show by indie dance-rock band LCD Soundsystem, along with the immediate aftermath for frontman James Murphy. Powerful concert footage and...