The statues are all distributed, the corks are all popped, and now it is time to talk about the 82nd Academy Awards in the past tense. We’ll get to who won, but first off I’d like to talk about who lost: the viewing audience. This has to be one of the worst awards broadcasts in recent memory. Overlong and underwhelming, the only thing interesting in the show was actually finding out who won, which is weird because that often takes a backseat to the rest of the spectacle.

Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin were charming, albeit neutered, hosts. They farmed the opening number out to Neil Patrick Harris, which was predictably fine, but it seemed like a complete redux of his bouts as Tony and Emmy host. On paper it sounds poignant, but in practice it felt stale. I long for the days when Billy Crystal would superimpose himself into the top nominated films. I can understand the new hosts wanting to move forward with an original spin, only this felt like a step backwards. Read on...

Precious. Intimate. Immediate. Privileged. These are the ways we can describe the various moments that occur in Spike Jonze’s adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are. These terms, which any frosh film student should recognize, are generally associated with documentary cinema. They have become applicable here, however, because Mr. Jonze rightly decided to let the pomp and circumstance that comes with any major studio children’s film fall away, focusing this film on the rambunctious perspective of a child in flux.

Hyperactive and creative Max is a boy with seemingly no friends but his mother. Always looking for an adventure to go on, he is stuck in a life of suburban boredom and Oedipal rage (aren’t we all?). There are a bevy of Freudian signifiers which lead to Max’s escape from his home on a journey to the ends of the earth. There he meets the folks we lovingly call “the wild things” (Buber, anyone?) who take him in as their king. At home with the beasts, our young ruffian slowly finds that even life in his own private utopia can get complicated. Read on...

Oscars in tow, Joel and Ethan Coen don’t seem to know the meaning of a slow period. Their latest project, A Serious Man, just like Burn After Reading before it, is a small film with big ambitions. It is a family drama; it is a memoir of the golden age of American suburban rabbinic Judaism; it is a study of the intellect’s struggle with the belief (or disbelief) in a higher power. Acerbically funny and virtuously moody, this film is yet another feather in the cap of the brothers Coen.

In a landscape littered with cinematic imposters, A Serious Man features a main character who can accurately be described as a classic “schlemiel”. Larry Gopnik, played with remarkable sincerity by Michael Stuhlbarg, is a man who never asked for anything from God in his life, but when he is faced with trial upon trial, Mr. Gopnik finds his latent bent to the point of imminent breakage. A Physics professor at the local university, Larry is an impotent, small man who gets trampled from every angle. His wife is leaving him, a student is stong-arming him into a getting a better grade, his pothead son’s Bar Mitzvah is approaching amid mounting financial pressure, and his awkward brother takes up the only remaining space in his home. Read on...

As the explody, franchise-licious summer wanes and awards-chasing fare creeps up on us, it is nice to know that movies like Extract still get made amidst our modern state of Hollywood sameness. Simple, funny and only lewd enough to make your grandma shudder, Mike Judge’s new film is a formulaic comedy for the set who think they are over formulaic comedy.

Jason Bateman, who in my opinion is often the saving grace of otherwise clunky films (see: Juno, The Kingdom, Hancock; one can only hope for Couples Retreat), plays Joel, a sexually frustrated owner of a flavor extract manufacturing plant. Having invented a better way to make concentrated flavors (the film’s eponymous extract), he has found a way to turn a decent enough profit to get a big house, a fast car and a big TV for his wife to watch while he wanks away in the bathroom. Seemingly idyllic, everything from the annoying neighbor to his nagging employees make Joel long for his bartending days, when life was simple. Read on...

The Ugly Truth is a romantic comedy that is meant to be a vehicle for Katherine Heigl’s comedic talents. Unfortunately, she is grossly upstagesd by Gerard Butler’s deft skill in the laughs department. Instead of driving this pony, she is more often (literally) the butt of every joke. The film follows Heigl as Abby, an uptight control freak television producer, who meets her match in Mr. Butler as Mike, a misogynistic slob who lands a position on her show. Believe it or not, this boring redux of every other rom com you’ve ever seen is actually an attempt at a smarter kind of comedy. Going out on a limb, the film keeps the dirt in to earn an R rating, rendering this a raunchy sex-comedy tailor made for proper ladies. We know that boys will go see R-rated romps, but will women? Yes, but they’re going to need something a little more substantial than The Ugly Truth.

Written by veterans Karen McCullah Lutz and Kirsten Smith as well as newcomer Nicole Eastman, the script saves almost all of the good lines for Mr. Butler’s chauvinist pig. I can only imagine how they must have relished banging out lines like “Well thank your pussy for me” for the British beefcake. On the other hand, they handed Ms. Heigl the word “cock” and asked her to run with it. As the slick Mike dips behind a couch before Abby answers her door in her new My-Fair-Lady-ed skin, he calls her back at the last second, only to smack her ass for an uproarious laugh. He is the power broker here, he is the funny one. Read on...

When adapting a novel to the screen, a director may choose one of two routes: stick to the facts, especially the plot points, of the original work, or follow the same emotional arc as the literary forbear, perhaps treading over a few accuracies along the way. David Yates has opted for the former in Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, but only just so. While the digital wizards were busy making sure audiences leave the theater thoroughly wowed, the overall story of this sixth installment seems to have been left by the wayside.

Half-Blood Prince spends most of its time in the troubled world of adolescent love instead of, you know, that whole end-of-days wizarding war that’s been going on. Sure there are death eaters and imminent danger and wands-out moments of intensity, but this film seems to be all about the snogging gossip around the halls of Hogwarts. It’s not that I don’t care for these bits of the plot, it’s that these amorous sidelines were always supplemental to the magic, not fore-fronted.

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Too often, we as viewers fall into filmic ruts. We convince ourselves that our understanding of a particular topic, character or time period has been perfected; questioning such concepts would be blasphemy, or at the very least uninteresting. Collectively, we must be shocked out of such beliefs. With Public Enemies, director Michael Mann has taken everything we thought we knew about the gangster film, deconstructed it, and put it back together into something wholly different and occasionally successful.

Johnny Depp slips into the bad boy role of bank robber John Dillinger. An opening title card informs us that he was enjoying the golden age of bank robbing, though this is hardly a heist film. There is some talk of a big “score” early on, but instead of any major planning going into the robberies, Dillinger and his partners rob as often as needed to pay the bills. The film plays more like a biopic than  anything else, but that doesn’t mean it is wholly impotent in the shoot ‘em up department. Read on...

There are many kinds of war films. Those that celebrate the heroism of men and women who rise to the occasion and those that examine the absurd event that is conflict; those that glorify the gory action on the ground and those that question the human event in its bloodiest hour. The Hurt Locker manages, quite impressively, to check off all of the above and then some. It is a heart-stopping thriller set amidst the modern quagmire that is Baghdad that never lingers long enough to feel preachy yet manages to suspend you in moments of extreme tension for what seems like eternity. In other words, it’s a bad ass good time.

Director Kathryn Bigelow, probably most well known for the 1991 surf action film Point Break, decided to stem the intellectual deconstruction of the war in Iraq that has hampered most recent attempts to bring the conflict to the big screen. Instead, she has no bones about making a first rate action thriller. The opening scene alone, in which a radio controlled robot breaks just before it can detonate an IED, is worth the price of popcorn. If you can’t handle it straight away, leave the theater.

In need of a new Bomb Tech on their team, Sergeant JT Sanborn and Specialist Owen Eldridge find themselves under the command of Staff Sergeant William James. James is a reckless cowboy who rarely lets the others in on his half-cocked plans as they traverse Iraq in search of bombs. The relationship that the three form is complicated to say the least. In Sanborn we find a rationalist who offers us a moral grounding. Eldridge is more complex, a man-child thrown into the war probably trying to prove his strength.

But the most interesting character is certainly Sergeant James, played with boyish bravado by Jeremy Renner. Acting as if he is an army of one, James always seems to come out in one piece no matter how stupid his plans seem to be. As soon as we feel we know him and understand his motivation, he goes and does something even crazier. Not quite a patriot nor a mercenary, his character slowly unravels and we begin to see an incredibly strong deconstruction of modern masculinity. I don’t want to get into the details because it is the little things in this movie that become shocking to you as it progresses.

Ms. Bigelow has done what many of Hollywood’s biggest guns have failed to do: make an interesting film about Iraq that people will actually watch. Steering clear of political statements, she has crafted a solid character study amidst the most important international issue our nation is embroiled in. It’s the Iraq movie we have been waiting for, but we hardly notice that fact as we wipe the sweat from our brow and stand up from the edge of our seat.