John Beifuss

Like "Training Day," which earned its star a Best Actor Oscar, "Safe House" presents Denzel Washington as a sort of satanic tempter, complete with devilish goatee -- a sly, superior figure of dark aspect and apparently dark designs. Again, the ...

Rapper turned music entrepreneur and entertainment mogul Sean Combs — perhaps still better known as “Puff Daddy” or “P. Diddy” — has signed on as an executive producer of a planned fictionalized studio remake of “Undefeated,” the made-in-Memphis football film ...

The first ceremony for the Academy Awards of Merit (the now- trademarked nickname "Oscar" had yet to be coined) took place on May 16, 1929, at a private dinner at the then-spanking-new Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. The ceremony lasted only 15 ...

Angelina Jolie is an actress of "physical perfection" (according to Vogue magazine) as well as a celebrated humanitarian (she's a Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees). She combines her profession and her passion to make her ...

Once lauded as the master of "gynecological horror," David Cronenberg applies his directorial speculum to the human cranium in "A Dangerous Method," a confident and fascinating film about the relationship between big brains Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung and their ...

Already famous and perhaps overhyped as the first wide-release black-and-white silent film of the modern era, writer-director Michel Hazanavicius' salute to the romance of the movies is novel, funny and refreshing -- it's terrific entertainment.

Albert Nobbs is a strange "little man" in an unshowy little movie titled "Albert Nobbs," and I took a shine to them both.

Missi Pyle is almost single-handedly responsible for the PG-13 rating attached to "The Artist." According to the classification and rating administration of the Motion Picture Association of America, "The Artist" -- considered the front-runner for this year's Best Picture Oscar ...

"The Artist" is terrific entertainment. Already famous and perhaps overhyped as the first black-and-white silent film of the modern era, this salute to the romance of the movies is novel, funny and refreshing. It's a celebration of joyful uninhibited performance, ...

From its wordy title to the impressive vocabulary and compulsive list making of its possibly autistic young narrator hero, "Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close" is a motion picture that never liberates itself from the printed page.

The genitals are exposed while the motivations are mysterious in "Shame," an elegantly composed but overwrought film about a man who apparently wants to obliterate himself through sex -- to fornicate away the pain, so to speak.

The pioneering African-American fighter pilots of the Tuskegee Airmen deserve a more memorable and less cornball movie tribute than "Red Tails," a George Lucas production that perhaps was motivated as much by the Marin County mogul's desire to top the ...

Meryl Streep has 16 Academy Award nominations — more than any performer. She already has two Oscars. I don't begrudge her more, but this year I'd rather see Viola Davis win Best Actress for "The Help" (which might happen) or ...

A kid whacks another kid in the face with a stick at the start of Roman Polanski's "Carnage."

“Glee” meets God in “Joyful Noise,” a lively gospel musical set in a cheerful if economically depressed Georgia small town that’s the apparent embodiment of the “postracial” America that some people hoped would be inaugurated the same day as Barack ...

In 2011, we lost some big entertainers -- literally. From singers and actors to longtime local talent, we say so long one last time.

Mississippi-born Memphian Mike McCarthy has devoted much of his life to scratching the itch of his Elvis obsession with art. He's created comic books with such characters as "Psychedelvis" and "Rebelvis," and movies with such titles as "Damselvis, Daughter of ...

With mirthless humor, the agents of the British Secret Intelligence Service who maneuver through "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy" -- whether the classic 1974 novel, the 1979 BBC miniseries or this new feature-film adaptation -- refer to their employer as "the ...

A cynic might say that Memphis is better known for random violence than organized crime. Nevertheless, "Momo: The Sam Giancana Story," a documentary about a man described as Chicago's "second most powerful mob boss" (the first was Al Capone), will ...

The movies are having a conversation among themselves.

A story of the unbreakable bond between unworthy man and noble beast, "War Horse," which opens Christmas Day, takes place in rural England and on the battlefields of France during the First World War, but it owes as much -- ...

In its 20th annual awards voting, the Southeastern Film Critics Association — an organization with members who represent electronic and print media outlets (including The Commercial Appeal) in nine states — this week named "The Descendants" the best film of ...

Matt Damon and Scarlett Johansson take over a failing California menagerie in Cameron Crowe's "We Bought a Zoo," opening Friday at theaters around the Mid-South.

"Violence against women increases -- CDC study: 1 in 4 beaten, 1 in 5 raped." That headline appeared last week on the front page of The Commercial Appeal. As alarming as it was, it may not have shocked devotees of ...

As frenetic if hardly as entertaining as "Raiders of the Lost Ark," Steven Spielberg's "The Adventures of Tintin" introduces us to its title hero in the midst of a busy European marketplace, where the boyish newspaper reporter is posing for ...

"Young Adult" is an unusual and ultimately sour film that makes no attempt to ingratiate itself with those moviegoers who expect a Charlize Theron "comedy" to be likable. Its condescending attitude toward "unsophisticated" suburban mainstream society, with its chain restaurants ...

"Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked" opens Friday at theaters around the Mid-South. Read more capsule descriptions and starred mini-reviews by The Commercial Appeal movie writer John Beifuss.

The cliché pop combo word "bromance" isn't quite strong enough for the Arthur Conan Don't-Ask-Don't-Tell camaraderie on display in "Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows," a tiring and overwrought if occasionally entertaining action-adventure sequel in which the master detective's pursuit ...

Danish writer-director Lars von Trier's "Melancholia" is so bleak that it imagines not just the end of the world but the annihilation of all life in the universe.

"Into the Abyss" is the second documentary this year from tireless Bavarian existentialist Werner Herzog. The first, "Cave of Forgotten Dreams," was a 3D exploration of the prehistoric art of France's Chauvet Cave. In "Abyss," Herzog spelunks darker depths: the ...

"Blackthorn" might be described as a south-of-the-equator Western. It's a film with horses, posses, bushwhackers, stolen booty, stunning landscapes and weathered faces, the most prominent of which belongs to Sam Shepard as one James Blackthorn, formerly known as Butch Cassidy.

Kristin Scott Thomas is a manipulative and sadistic queen bee while Ludivine Sagnier is a bespectacled worker bee who develops a sting of her own in "Love Crime," a spare and sleek French suspense film that is the posthumously released ...

Memphis-born filmmaker Ira Sachs will debut his new movie, “Keep the Lights On,” in January at the 28th annual Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah.

In his new book, Tav Falco describes his influential art-trash-punk band, Panther Burns, as recreating the sound of a feline predator in flames -- "an unholy amalgam of animal lust and divine transubstantiation."

Capsule descriptions and starred mini-reviews by The Commercial Appeal movie writer John Beifuss.

Winner of the Grand Jury Prize in Drama at this year's Sundance Film Festival, "Like Crazy" offers what movie publicists would call an "honest" portrait of young lovers frustrated if not thwarted by geography and red tape.

"The Descendants" seems certain to be nominated for Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Adapted Screenplay and possibly Best Supporting Actress. By the time the Oscars roll around, it might even be considered the front-runner in most of these categories.

"As long as there are singing frogs and joking bears ... the world can't be such a bad place after all."

Possibly, the potentates at Britain's Aardman animation studios are unaware of the popular Arthur the Aardvark books and PBS television series. I mention this because so far, to a person, everyone I've mentioned "Arthur Christmas" to has registered a blank ...

According to movie-history folklore, viewers of the Lumiere Brothers’ “The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station” were panicked by the shot of an approaching train when the 50-second film was screened for the first time in 1895. Unfamiliar ...

According to the Chinese zodiac, 2011 is the Year of the Rabbit.

Probably the first of popular Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar's movies to achieve wide exposure in the U.S., "Matador" (1986), starring a young Antonio Banderas, opens with a shocking scene in which an ex-bullfighter pleasures himself while watching violent clips from ...

The title "Martha Marcy May Marlene" isn't exactly a tongue-twister, but it's hard to remember, and that seems to be the point. Almost certain to earn a deserved Best Actress Oscar nomination for rising 22-year-old star Elizabeth Olsen (yes, the ...

Sometimes it seems as if the movies are telling a story that changes slightly as it is passed from film to film, as in a game of "whispers" or "telephone," in which a message is relayed from one person to ...

Many successful independent movies from regional filmmakers these days make a virtue of their lack of production resources and embrace their digital-video esthetic.

"Margin Call," a modestly budgeted drama that transforms a Manhattan investment bank tower into ground zero for the slow-motion big bang of the 2008 financial crisis, and the big-budget caper comedy "Tower Heist," about a motley crew of workers who ...

With "Anonymous," director Roland Emmerich does to Elizabethan history and Shakespearean scholarship what his previous movies, "The Day After Tomorrow" and the "Godzilla" remake, did to the sciences of climate change and herpetology.

"Master Jia died inside the Buddha's left eye." That's a statement you don't expect, even at the movies. It offers a clue to the distinctiveness -- especially in the current film marketplace -- of "Detective Dee and the Mystery of ...

Documentaries are sometimes referred to as nonfiction films. In theory, they represent the cinematic equivalent of journalism, even if they’re experimental or highly subjective — what Tom Wolfe called “New Journalism.” They are constructed from research, interviews and reported if ...

On American television, the association of "Day of the Dead" and Halloween weekend is usually a reference to a broadcast of director George Romero's 1985 zombie sequel. In Mexico and in Hispanic communities in Memphis and elsewhere, however, the day ...