RECOMMENDED: The Times says “meh,” fans are crying foul and mostly, we’re just worried about CGItis (the foul curse that’s turning many major motion pictures into video games), but none of this will sully the curiosity surrounding Tim Burton’s tacky goth take on Alice In Wonderland. In Burton’s remix, Alice, played all wooden-like by Mia [...]

RECOMMENDED: Is anybody else a little wary of how Martin Scorsese has been hanging on to Leonardo DiCaprio for dear life? DiCaprio pulls his weight, for sure — his performances in The Departed and Gangs Of New York carried their respective titles, especially in the case of the former — but you can’t help but [...]

RECOMMENDED: Hey, remember in the 1990s, when it seemed like just about every week, there was wacky road-comedy thing with Steve Buscemi (and/or Parker Posey, Steve Zahn, etc.) coming out? Saint John of Las Vegas does, and it’s here to tell you: Why not put some Sarah Silverman in the mix, too? OH SNAP. You [...]

RECOMMENDED: From Romania comes Police, Adjective, a Kafka-esque dramedy directed by Corneliu Porumboiu. (You Romanian film buffs might remember him from 12:08 East of Bucharest.) Following the travails of an undercover cop who’s unwilling to arrest a pot-smoking teen, knowing full well that by the laws of Romania, he’d do seven years in the clink [...]

RECOMMENDED: Having just nabbed the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film, director Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon now begins a victory lap in U.S. theaters that, if all goes according to plan, will see it vying for an Oscar in the same category. Set in a small German village on the eve of World [...]

RECOMMENDED: What, you thought we were gonna go with Avatar? What are you, 14, son? (OK, fair enough: It’s a popcorn movie. Do your thing.) At any rate, we can’t act like The Young Victoria isn’t the kind of sleepy English costume drama you can take The Olds to see over the holidays, and maybe [...]

Goddamnit, Clooney! Two weeks in a row with the lead Film Sweat pick. Up In The Air is the Jason Reitman-directed drama about a man afraid to love, adapted from the Walter Kirn book of the same name. It is either a metaphor for Great Recession-era America, a secret weeper for the modern world, or [...]

RECOMMENDED: The money behind Fantastic Mr. Fox could have employed any halfwit director and scored a commercial hit because of subject matter and holiday release. But instead of going for the softball, the studio took a chance on a guy who makes his living in a niche market with oddball humor. Not exactly a recipe [...]

The sooner we can all admit that today’s breed of vampire-obsessives are the new cat ladies, the better we will all be able to understand this phenomenon. And the better we understand that, the sooner we can all admit that this is everyone’s fault. Women like these vampire jerkoffs so much because, in some very [...]

Imagine a film where two catering waiters carry on a rambling dialectic about the needs and wants of brattish NYU professors and their complex sexual nature, while an army of empty characters interact in a plotless void. No imagination needed. The Office’s John Krasinksi has made this very movie. It’s called Brief Interviews With Hideous [...]

RECOMMENDED: At the screening we attended, The Men Who Stare At Goats got more actual LOL-laugh-out-loud laughs than any other movie in recent memory. The best part? Those laughs weren’t cheap; OK, the ones about goats falling dead to the floor because George Clooney was looking at them were kinda cheap, but mostly, these were [...]

Editor’s note: Please enjoy this expanded edition of Film Sweat, including last week’s recommendations that were unpublished due to technical difficulties.

RECOMMENDED: An Education stars Carey Mulligan as a wise-beyond-her-years British schoolgirl who becomes the apple of businessman Peter Sarsgaard’s eye. And like Mad Men, it’s a window into that time before the 60s really happened, [...]

RECOMMENDED: Ever read Coco Chanel’s Wikipedia page? You should try it sometime; you may not like everything you find there — to be sure, Coco herself probably didn’t (cue scenes of Nazi sympathizing, dead lovers and other non-delights) — but it will put into perspective that whole thing about life being long and all of [...]

RECOMMENDED: The Secret Cinema presents Bookworms’ Revenge: Various Short Films on the themes of Reading, Writing, and General Nerdy Bookness at the 215 Festival, which opens tonight. (See Philebrity preview here.) And true to its billing, the Secret Cinema’s program tonight will feature a veritable cornucopia of nerd ephemera. Among other things: Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.: [...]

RECOMMENDED: Sure, Jane Campion’s Bright Star is slow and dreamy, but then again, so is Romantic Poetry of the 1800s. So granted, this languid costume drama — and here’s predicting that the costumes here will garner an Oscar nom for all of their handmade period-strangeness — is either your thing or it isn’t. But even [...]

RECOMMENDED: The Informant! is Steven Soderbergh’s satirical retelling of the true story of a corporate snitch who so believes the lie of big business in America that he gets totally stoked to work for the FBI, because it’s a bigger company. Matt Damon famously put on 30+ pounds for this role, of which his dorky [...]

Unless you’re willing to sign your soul away to the reality show devil, there aren’t many second chances in Hollywood. So, for those of you old enough to remember 1980’s scream-com personalities like Sam Kinison, Gilbert Gottfried, and Judy Tenuta, you can exhale a deep sigh of relief that Bobcat Goldthwait has come back from [...]

RECOMMENDED: Slim pickin’s this week, guys: Extract is a Mike Judge comedy starring Jason Bateman and Ben Affleck doing drugs. Not everybody goes to the movies to have their minds enriched.
ALSO NEW IN THEATERS: All About Steve, starring Philly’s own Bradley Cooper — can we just say how we love how he’s inherited the James [...]

RECOMMENDED: If the events of the last few weeks have taught us anything, it’s that sports fans are capable of taking no small amount of abuse and, in fact, they seem to thrive on it: In Philly at least, the more indefensible the player’s actions, the more fuel there is to go on the never-ending [...]

RECOMMENDED: If you see one Holocaust Revenge Fantasy movie this summer, for the love of all that is right and unholy, make it Inglourious Basterds, Quentin Tarantino’s 155-minute-long, blood-filled romp through Nazi-occupied France. And if it takes convincing someone who still cares about Brad Pitt to go with you, so be it: Pitt acquits [...]