Without an engaging central character, someone most people would hate, Up in the Air would not work as well as it does.

This is a departure for children’s films, where the movie grinds to a halt as the monsters display feelings.

Why waste time talking about how California will be engulfed in the San Andreas fault when you can throw $20 million on the screen to show it?

It is a physical impossibility to have enough liquid in your tear ducts to get through this movie in one sitting.

If he cannot control his time travel, how is it that he manages to show up to your wedding three times, at three different stages in his life?

A cameo by Matthew McConaughey minus one shirt would complete a full list of this genre’s modern contrivances.

While the audience sits on edge, the soldiers laugh, smile, and joke with each other.

This is normal for them.

It is easier to relate to someone, at least in a younger generation, who starts up a small blog and suddenly finds herself successful, especially compared to someone who writes a book because she graduated from a culinary school.
Then again, maybe it is just Amy Adam’s general perkiness that makes Julie Powell so likeable. For [...]

The first chapter of Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds is a film by itself. It is staggeringly well written, creating flesh out characters and a full story from a single scene. It has the necessary three acts as German officer Hans Landa (Christopher Waltz) slowly interrogates potential Jewish sympathizer Pierre (Denis Menochet) in his home.
Much of [...]

When the audience first meets Ray Eddy (Melissa Leo), she is sitting outside her trailer in her car, smoking a cigarette, and tears begin streaming down her eyes. Her husband has left her and taken the money for a new doublewide trailer, which her two sons need given the cramped conditions.
It is a tough situation, [...]