Steve A. Vineberg

Two of this season's movies, both based on true stories, remind us of the underrated pleasures of conventional filmmaking....

David Fincher's The Social Net­work, with a script by the mon­arch of machine-gun banter, Aaron Sor­kin (The West Wing), is a smart, funny film that tells the story of...

The French spy picture Farewell is literate, complex and thoughtful....

Neil Jordan's Ondine is a lovely picture, but it's so gentle and understated that it's attracted little attention....

Inauthenticity can come in a variety of forms....

It’s unlikely that the rest of 2010 will turn up another movie as astonishing as Vincere, by 70-year-old Italian director Marco Bellocchio....

The modest Irish picture The Eclipse has slipped below almost everyone’s radar; it’s moving quietly across the country in brief art-house engagements....

Set in rural Louisiana, Udayan Prasad’s tender, affecting road picture The Yellow Handker chief combines a coming-of-age narrative with the tale of a man driven to seek the salvation ...

Director Martin Scorsese goes for broke in Shutter Island. The style is a particularly gaudy brand of expressionism....

The Young Victoria, a chronicle of Queen Victoria’s early days on the English throne, avoids all the historical-epic pitfalls....

The title of Scott Cooper’s debut film, Crazy Heart, comes from a song by the movie’s protagonist, a country singer named Bad Blake (Jeff Bridges)....

The trailers for Precious suggest a weepy after-school special. But the movie itself turns out to be an honest piece of work—gritty, unsentimental and unconventional.

Spike Jonze’s film of Maurice Sendak’s classic children’s book, Where the Wild Things Are, substitutes pop psychology for Sendak’s exuberant, anarchic vision of childhood....

Set in early 1960s London, An Education is a coming-of-age film about a sharp-witted teenager who falls in love with a man in his thirties....

The title of Nora Ephron’s Julie and Julia equalizes its two plots: there is one about how Julia Child came to publish Mastering the Art of French Cooking and thereby alter the Americ...

After two likable hit comedies, The 40 Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up, writer-director Judd Apatow goes the serious route with Funny People. The results are disastrous.

Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker is the best movie to come out of the war in Iraq so far. In fact, it’s the finest American war film of the past decade.

The sweet and thrilling Pixar animated feature Up is a paean to the possibilities that remain in a life shadowed by loss and disappointment....

A riveting sci-fi adventure, Star Trek is the first of the summer blockbusters that audiences can truly care about. Its action is rooted in feeling rather than gimmickry.