Ian Buckwalter

Romantic comedies didn't always carry with them the air of immediate dismissal, that eye-rolling weariness born of dozens of interchangeable boy-meets-girl plots and posters featuring stars playfully leaning into or on one another. Romance at the movies wasn't always overfilled with cliches, stuffed with safe jokes heard a hundred times ...

Numbers from the World Health Organization put Sierra Leone at the top of the list for cases of Ebola. Yusuf Mackery explains what's being done to prevent infection and raise public awareness.

"This is Bruce Brown, thank you for watching, I hope you enjoyed my film."

That line, sounding a little like a proud eighth-grader closing out a book report he felt was particularly insightful, is the last piece of narration in the landmark 1964 surfing film The Endless Summer (which didn't ...

Zach Braff's Wish I Was Here feels like a spiritual descendant to his Garden State. As much as it shares his sensibilities, it also shares some of the earlier film's weaknesses.

Quinn Schansman, the dual U.S.-Dutch citizen killed on Malaysia Airlines MH17, was reportedly planning to join his family in Kuala Lumpur for vacation when the plane he was on was shot down over eastern Ukraine.

USA Today says: "Photos on social-media accounts show a fun-loving college student who enjoyed hanging ...

Think of Melissa McCarthy playing Megan in Bridesmaids, and you may first remember her defecating in a sink, or driving a minivan full of stolen puppies, or brazenly propositioning an air marshal. McCarthy stole the show with a talent for profanity and pratfalls, but it's a reflective one-on-one scene playing ...

"All things flow from the sacred engine. ... The engine is forever." The passengers on the titular train in Bong Joon-ho's grim, post-apocalyptic sci-fi tale essentially deify the locomotive that is their salvation. This "rattling ark" carries the last remainders of humanity, after an attempt to reverse global warming goes ...

Third Person announces itself in a messy tangle of people and locations, an unsolved Rubik's cube of disparate lives waiting for a hand to start turning. There's a harried woman running late for an appointment in New York. A stereotypical ugly American receiving a secretive envelope in Rome. A shapely ...

If there's any doubt that 22 Jump Street is a cartoon dressed in live-action clothing, it should disappear completely when Channing Tatum's lovably lunkheaded Detective Jenko is puzzling over an obvious set of connected clues when – DING! – the answer suddenly comes to him. That "Ding" is literal – ...

It's rarely a compliment to say that a movie is video game-like. That's usually shorthand for effects-heavy, narratively lightweight, CGI shoot'em-ups. Don't get me wrong: Edge of Tomorrow has no shortage of big effects set pieces, a lot of invading aliens getting shot at, and the seemingly ageless Tom Cruise ...

There's a scene in Seth MacFarlane's animated sitcom Family Guy in which the precocious baby Stewie attempts to get his mom's attention through a solid 30 seconds of just repeating her name or variations on the word "mom." That's the whole joke: A kid just keeps repeating essentially the same ...

The mustache and mullet make the man. Or so the man hopes.

In Jim Mickle's Cold in July, Richard Dane (Michael C. Hall) is a small town Texas entrepreneur in 1989, his days spent running a little frame shop on the main strip in town, evenings at home with his ...

This is a monster sold on a sigh. For all of the bombast, the buildings falling, and the brawling beasties, the moment when this Godzilla is most impressive, the moment he suddenly transcends his digital underpinnings and feels like a real presence, is one of his subtlest and quietest. During ...

"You're in my place," is the first line in Richard Ayode's, The Double, spoken to Simon James (Jesse Eisenberg) on an otherwise empty subway train where he's apparently sitting in someone's preferred spot. It's also an apt – and maybe a little too on the nose – summary of what ...

There's a great movie to be found in The Amazing Spider-Man 2, but it's not about superheroes, supervillains or impending urban calamities. It's a deeply felt and hugely winning romantic tragi-comedy about a pair of recent high school grads who are perfect for each other in every way, but just ...

Revenge at the movies is a dish best served not cold, but cool. Homemade justice isn't just meted out by the wronged onscreen; it's delivered with swagger, style, and steely-eyed bad-assery. Michael Caine as Carter, Uma Thurman as The Bride, Charles Bronson as Paul Kersey: These are all individuals who ...

Transcendence seems like the perfect film for Wally Pfister to kick off his career as a director. Pfister emerged as one of the best cinematographers in the business through his collaborations with Christopher Nolan (which also won him an Oscar, for Inception), and one of the hallmarks of that collaboration ...

Draft Day may be a sports movie, but football isn't the sport. Games are played, but they're not on a field. This is a chess match, a poker game and a battle of wills, and in the place of a team full of plucky underdogs trying to come up with ...

Eric Deggans looks at the move by Stephen Colbert from the show he does in character on Comedy Central to CBS late night.

"Dune will be the coming of God."

Hyperbole, thy name is Alejandro Jodorowsky. Early on in Frank Pavich's documentary about Jodorowsky's failed attempt to bring Frank Herbert's science-fiction epic to the screen back in the 1970s, he not only compares his vision to that of the arrival of a deity, ...