Tom Shadyac would like to buy the world a home and furnish it with love. Not a big home, mind you—perhaps a trailer, like the one the director of Ace Ventura: Pet Detective and Bruce Almighty now lives in. Because greed is bad, man, and nothing in nature takes more than it needs.
Those are some [...]

A nice guy does a not-very-nice thing in Tom McCarthy's Win Win. It's financial desperation that nudges New Jersey lawyer and wrestling coach Mike Flaherty (Paul Giamatti) into doing the unthinkable: becoming the legal guardian, for $1,500 a month, of a client (Burt Young) who's suffering from dementia.
Mike argues to the judge that he'll [...]

Are they or aren't they? That's the question that will dog you throughout Certified Copy, writer-director Abbas Kiarostami's first feature filmed outside of Iran. Juliette Binoche took Cannes' best actress price for her role as Elle, a Tuscany gallery owner who's a little too enthusiastic about a reading by James Miller (opera singer William [...]

Send Twilight back a couple of centuries and make Edward Cullen poor instead of vampiric and you've got Red Riding Hood, Catherine Hardwicke's update of the classic fairy tale and/or attempt to redeem herself to millions of Stephenie Meyer fans. With a proactive heroine this time, she nearly succeeds, even if you spend the [...]

Jeff Lipsky's Twelve Thirty is not so much composed of scenes as it is of a series of conversations—endless and increasingly tedious ones. The story, also scripted by the Flannel Pajamas director, involves a 22-year-old named Jeff (Jonathan Groff) who, despite being rightfully called "vanilla," gets awfully lucky with a family of comely women who [...]

Producer Michael Bay's douchebag fingerprints are all over I Am Number Four, a Twilight-meets-Transformers mash-up that will leave you alternately bored and confused. John (Alex Pettyfer) is an "extraordinary teen," which means he's an alien who's trying to blend in on Earth by pouting a lot and talking in a monotone. (He can also throw [...]

While filming The Mechanic, Ben Foster wasn't about to let something like vertigo—or even the possibility of death—prevent him from doing his own stunts. Particularly one of the movie's most stunning: a free-fall off the side of a 450-foot building that he performs with his co-star, stuntmaster Jason Statham.
"I'm not partial to heights," Foster says. [...]

"I like telling the story of life better than I do living it," Spalding Gray says somewhat cheerfully yet devastatingly in And Everything Is Going Fine, Steven Soderbergh's biography of Gray in which he completely removes his Soderbergh-ness from the equation to let his subject tell his own story.
Gray, who died of an apparent suicide [...]

For a story that's haunted by a murder mystery, Barney's Version is understated to the point of mundanity. The focus of this feature debut of director Richard J. Lewis is, you might have guessed, Barney (Paul Giammati), a Canadian schlub who drinks too much, watches too much hockey, and doesn't seem to care if he [...]

The frontrunner: The King's Speech, with 12 noms
The surprises: John Hawkes for Winter's Bone, Jeremy Renner for The Town, Jacki Weaver for Animal Kingdom
The disappointments: No directing nod for Christopher Nolan? And please, Academy: Hailee Steinfeld is the lead actress of True Grit. Period.
Here are the major categories.
BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
Christian Bale, The Fighter
John Hawkes, Winter's [...]