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The famous picture about two "cowboys" working with livestock who initiate a homosexual love affair in 1963, Brokeback Mountain (2005) tells us that sexual and emotional self-denial is an unfortunate, even a tragic, thing.  It's wrong:  What it should be telling us...

It never came to a Tulsa theatre, but 2007's Broken English, which I saw on DVD, is a small triumph for director-writer Zoe Cassavetes.  Nora Wilder (Parker Posey) has no boyfriend.  She does have a fling, however, in her native New York City with a Frenchman, Julien...

Shark Night 3-D (2011) is meant to resemble grindhouse movies of the '70s, which is to say it's disgustingly low and stupid.  Its PG-13 rating, though, is just about right:  it features neither the F word nor bona fide nudity. It must be that an American Idol culture...

Though somewhat plebeian, Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ (2004) is a heartfelt and unusual religious, or Christian, film.  The direction is sometimes heavy-handed, as when Jesus dissuades the Jewish men from stoning Mary Magdalene.  But mainly it is absolutely...

The failure of America's first black president to see the unsatisfactory directions in which he is taking the country (e.g., health-insurance premiums are rising and entrepreneurs decline to start businesses because of Obamacare) has driven the minds behind The Help...

The foreign-aid programs or projects of Western governments are there to help the poor.  They are also there to be exploited by crooks, which is what happens in Gianni Amelio's deeply humane Lamerica, from 1995.  The crooks in question are Fiore and Gino, two Italians...

Re My Summer of Love (2005): A teenaged redhead called Mona (Natalie Press) lives in Yorkshire, England with her brother Phil (Paddy Considine), a former convict.  They constitute the only family the pair have, the mother in fact having died of cancer, and their...

On the Robert Rauschenberg exhibition at Philbrook Museum in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which exhibition ends on Sept. 11, 2011: Most of the Rauschenberg assemblages, lithographs, etc. here offer little in the way of an aesthetic experience.  Storyline 1 (1968), for example,...

It is never made clear just why Emily (Julianne Moore) no longer wants to be married to Cal (Steve Carell) in Crazy Stupid Love (2011), but that is the point at which the movie's plot takes off.  Early on, a splendid scene crops up in which Cal drives a 17-year-old...