Iron Man 3, co-written and directed by Shane Black, whose quick-witted 2005 indie Kiss Kiss Bang Bang likely helped lead Robert Downey Jr. score the title role in this star-reviving series, is two movies in one. More often than not, such a critical observation lends itself to a scathing analysis about how a picture doesn’t know what it wants to be, but in this case, both movies work and they fit together well enough that the medley sings. In fact,…

After his thematically challenging, emotionally taxing first two films, Shotgun Stories and Take Shelter, one wouldn’t have naturally predicted that budding American auteur Jeff Nichols would next move onto an old-fashioned crowd-pleaser of a boys’ adventure film. But I suppose Nichols needed a break from doom and gloom, just as audiences do, and there couldn’t have been a better classic entertainment for the filmmaker to channel his knack for capturing the cultural spirit of the American heartland into than Mud,…

There are two reasons that Craig Zobel could have decided to make Compliance, both equally wrongheaded:

1) Zobel simply wanted to expose this case (and, by extension, the others like it) to the world, without any sort of greater message. While I don't buy this as the filmmaker's motivation for a second, some people have argued such, so I'll address it...

Put simply: text-based reporting, as had already been done extensively in this case (meaning, no further examination was really…

The best film of 2011 is also the most criminally under-seen. Blue-collar, Midwestern father Curtis LaForche is either developing paranoid schizophrenia or accurately prophesizing the apocalypse — a binary that could have all too easily become fodder for hokey metaphor. But with writer/director Jeff Nichols and actor Michael Shannon at the helm (their second film together, following 2007’s Shotgun Stories), Curtis becomes one of the most authentically human characters in the history of cinema. He may be the symbolic fulcrum…