Nick Huinker

Kathryn Bigelow’s mastery turns a largely spying-free spy movie into one of the best films of 2012.

Less than a year ago, the Mission: Impossible franchise offered Ghost Protocol as a new standard in name-brand espionage adventure; next to Skyfall, it looks kind of like an old James Bond movie.

The Man With the Iron Fists is a direct hit at a target audience, and damned if most of them won’t be on board from the moment bearded Chinese dudes start wailing on each other.

The Master isn’t really a story, about Scientology or anything else, as much as a dual character study featuring two exceptional actors playing out two crucial archetypes.

David Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis is a movie of ideas, or at least one idea.

Hamburger’s live performances, often held up as an example of so-called anti-comedy, consist largely of ex-wife jokes, flailing one-liners, and foul-spirited Q&A gags that walk a line between conscious hackery and transcendence.

Surf music has, in the past few decades, become more or less a riff refuge for mellowing punks and math rockers; but here, over four songs, the Mutations lean reverently towards the genre’s bedrock in early ’60s youth music.

In many regards, it’s an immense success, most strikingly in the degree to which it closes the series out by embracing what’s come before. In franchise-minded Hollywood, it’s unusual to see properties like this given leeway to tell a big ...

at this point there’s no telling which Soderbergh would show up for Magic Mike, but the potential seemed there for something genuinely subversive.

From the title’s allusion to Greek mythology on down, Ridley Scott and screenwriters Jon Spaihts and Damon Lindelof are intent on bringing the director’s recent trademark of handsome self-seriousness to the production.