Darin Miller

The Beatles and Elvis Presley famously incorporated themselves and their music into narrative movies. Other bands have opted to sell concerts or create documentaries about themselves. Metallica, in Metallica Through the Never, has chosen a different course: a blend of

Having successfully conquered the world of NASCAR with the hit Cars, Disney has taken to the sky. The latest installment into the Universe of Cars is Planes, an international underdog story. Dusty (voiced by Dane Cook) is a young crop duster

R.I.P.D. has the ingredients of a blockbuster: Robert Schwentke of Red directs the Men in Black-style buddy cop comic adaptation, starring Jeff Bridges as a rugged law man not unlike Rooster Cogburn in True Grit. Ryan Reynolds is theoretically the weakest

Henry David Thoreau went to the woods because he wanted to live deliberately. And given the wordy dialogue spoken by some of screenwriter Chris Galletta’s characters, The Kings of Summer seems to nod at Thoreau’s brave desire to cut a broad

Last year Mel Gibson made headlines for the direct-to-VOD Get the Gringo, a fun picture about an American surviving inside a ruthless Mexican prison. Netflix’s upcoming Arrested Development season and House of Cards prove that such strategies can and will

Just years after the end of World War II, Thor Heyerdahl reminded the world that adventure was not just in destruction on the battlefield, but in conquering nature. That’s the story of Kon-Tiki, the Norwegian foreign film Oscar nominee. Thor

In the final moments of Beyond the Hills, a passing bus splashes dirty slush onto the windshield of a police van. The van’s wipers smear the grimy water across the windshield. It’s one of the more exciting moments in a

In Freedom, author Jonathan Franzen compares pop music hits to chicklets: their flavor is easily accessible, and when you’re through with them, you spit them out and move onto something else. He might say the same about the MTV-Paramount-MGM collaboration Hansel

Baltimore, excitement over the Ravens aside, is a depressed city. Its unemployment rate has been consistently above the rest of the U.S. for years, reaching 12.6 percent in August 2010. It lingers above 9 percent today. Aggravating the bleak situation

The foreign language Academy Award nominee from Germany this year once again focuses on the dark decades the eastern half of the country endured while under Soviet influence. Set in 1980, “Barbara” details the life of a doctor, Barbara Wolff

Santa Claus has been brought to the screen for decades as a jolly gift giver making kids’ dreams come true, with the occasional divergence as a killer purging his naughty list. In “Rise of the Guardians,” director Peter Ramsey and

The Petraeus scandal is an unfortunate reminder of the devastating damage an affair can cause. Russian author Leo Tolstoy recognized the danger of straying from a spouse, even going so far as to quote Romans 12:19, “Vengeance is mine, I

A year after “Bridesmaids” became a female comedy sensation Anna Kendrick and a comic cast of ladies are poised to do it again. Kendrick, sassy and delightful, is the sarcastic but adorable star of “Pitch Perfect,” a PG-13 ensemble comedy

Everything wrong with “Hit and Run” can be summed up in a moment when Dax Shepard’s character tells his girlfriend Annie (Kristen Bell) why he chose the name Charles Bronson for his alias in the witness protection program. Charles’ father

It’s fitting that “Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry” was released on the opening day of the 2012 LondonOlympic Games. Ai, the film’s subject, gained international recognition for his involvementin designing Beijing’s “Bird’s Nest” Olympic stadium. But he threw away his societal

The battle of Gettysburg was, by all accounts, a turning point in the American Civil War. But thanks to best-selling author Seth Grahame-Smith, and the cinematic adaptation of his Lincoln “biography,” future generations may view the battle in a different

Few crimes appall the general populace like those committed against children, the subject of a haunting new French film called “Polisse.” The cops who make up the child protection unit in Paris wade through these most reprehensible cases daily. And

Tartarus is the hell of Greek mythology, but in Hollywood remakes it’s as popular a destination as Olympus itself. Disney and 20th Century Fox sent Hercules and Percy Jackson down to the depths of the underworld. Now Warner Brothers has

The ’80s TV show “21 Jump Street,” about an undercover police unit that specialized in combating youth crime, helped launch Johnny Depp’s career. The show’s original producer dusted the concept off for a feature film update, and with Jonah Hill