Alan Rickman

Director Gavin Hood’s new thriller, ‘Eye in the Sky,’ is a vital commentary on the nature of point-and-click warfare.

30. Sense and Sensibility Directed by: Ang Lee Ang Lee has gone in about eight different directions in terms of genre. His resume includes “The Ice Storm,” “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” Hulk,” “Brokeback Mountain,” “Life of Pi,” and this delightful Jane Austen adaptation, starring Emma Thompson, Hugh Grant, Alan Rickman, and young Kate Winslet. “Sense …

Traditional Christmas films get overplayed this time of year so every once in a while it’s nice to play something that doesn’t feature clay-mation or Jimmy Stewart diving off a bridge. For those cinephiles seeking a little more subversive entertainment for the long holiday break, check out these five films. Die Hard The Scene: After …

Galaxy Quest Written by David Howard and Robert Gordon Directed by Dean Parisot USA, 1999 “Never give up. Never surrender.” Truer words have never been spoken. In 1999, the science fiction genre was shaken up a bit by a movie so smart and so funny that no other film has managed to duplicate its greatness …

Lee Daniels’ The Butler is an intensely silly film, but all things considered, it’s silly for unexpected reasons. A movie that offers up the image of John Cusack playing President Richard Nixon, with the only distinction between Cusack’s normal visage and his Nixonian veneer being a Pinocchio-like nasal extension, should have its silliness all sewn up in such goofy celebrity casting. But instead, what makes Lee Daniels’ The Butler almost entertainingly ridiculous is less the eclectic, deliberately weird cameos and more a flat, sappy, and inconsistent-to-the-point-of-being-schizophrenic script that very badly wants to tie its title character to Important Events of the 20th Century without fleshing said character in at all.

Gambit Written by Joel Coen and Ethan Coen Directed by Michael Hoffman USA, 2012 This loose remake of a 1966 film of the same name – that starred Shirley MacLaine, Michael Caine and Herbert Lom – has had a curiously long journey to the screen for a comedy, spending fourteen years stranded in numerous stages …

On December 14, 2012, a young man named Adam Lanza broke into a primary school and fatally shot 26 people in the small village of Sandy Hook, Connecticut. Twenty of them were children, aged 6 or 7. On that day, no matter where I went or what I did, I couldn’t stop thinking about the …

Tom Noonan as Francis Dollarhyde in Manhunter (Michael Mann, 1986, USA): Noonan is absolutely incredible as a serial murderer in this underrated adaptation of Thomas Harris’ novel Red Dragon. With all respect to the talented but miscast actors involved in Brett Ratner’s 2002 adaptation Red Dragon (USA), with the exception of Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal …