Stand-up comics feel compelled to make you laugh. They’re like an obnoxious uncle, with better material. The competition is so fierce these days that most of them are pretty good. I laugh a lot. But unlike my feelings for Catherine Keener, for example, I don’t find myself wishing they were my...

1. In the final movie all of the prepubescent girls in love with Harry will be lusting after an adult man, not the young boy from the books. 2. As the actor who played Dumbledore passed away between movies, parents will be forced to explain why he “looks different”. 3. The descriptions of butterbeer give...

Harry is better than ever, a triumph of visual wonder and emotional storytelling. Only Muggles, who wouldn’t know Slytherin from Gryffandor, will dismiss it as kid stuff for the multitudes who drank the Kool Aid of J.K. Rowling’s seven books. The rap on Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, the...

I am as much a film geek as a tech geek. In a previous life, I reviewed music and movies, and had lots more fun with the latter. If someone offered me a film-review job that paid my mortgage, I’d take it in a second, but I have a feeling that will remain a part of my past rather than become my...

You will die. We all will, eventually. But how are you going to get there? Face melting off, head exploding, getting shot by a hunter? There’s many a way to go, it’s not just about how gory it is although that’s always a good way, but it’s also about the style. As the old junglist...

Michael Mann’s “Public Enemies” is a grave and beautiful work of art. Shot in high-definition digital by a filmmaker who’s helping change the way movies look, it revisits with meticulous detail and convulsions of violence a short, frantic period in the life and bank-robbing times of John Dillinger,...