Perhaps the most striking thing about Spike Jonze’s “Her”, a tender Vonnegut-esque fable about a man who falls in love with his phone’s sentient operating system, is how seldom the film feels like a high-concept exercise. It’s to the immense credit of Jonze’s script, a sensitive and genuinely curious look at programmed living and the follies of possessive love that unfolds like “When Harry Met Skynet”, that the film’s central relationship ultimately feels like a somewhat typical portrait of modern…

Ostensibly a modern-to-the-minute adaptation of James Thurber’s indelible short story, Ben Stiller’s “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” is kind of like if Akira Kurosawa’s “Ikiru” were remade as an 114-minute Super Bowl commercial. A visually playful enlightenment drama that’s so preoccupied with inspiring its audience that it never bothers articulating a coherent message to inspire them with, Stiller’s film so consistently undercooks its cheap Hallmark sentiments that none of these pseudo-rousing peans to the inherent wonder of being alive…

A macro-economic horror story in the guise of an exceptionally harrowing hostage thriller, Paul Greengrass’ “Captain Phillips” dramatizes a 2009 incident in which a small band of Somali pirates hijacked an American cargo ship, a siege that has since become emblematic of the recent rise in similar armed attacks. Anchored by a compellingly candid titular performance by Tom Hanks (his best on-screen work since “Catch Me if You Can”), Greengrass’ latest recreation of recent history’s most vividly violent events is…

an apocalypse of cuteness, the Citizen Kane of Disney Dad movies. humane, complex & heartbreaking to the hilt. i'm genuinely disturbed by how much of my future self i saw in the film – it's an uncanny portrait of the dad I'm afraid of being. methinks some of my less enthusiastic colleagues fundamentally misconstrued the central questions of the film.

i don't think Kore-eda's narrative is preoccupied with questioning whether the rich / cold man is a better father than the poor…