RECOMMENDED: We know most of you are going to see it anyway, and no stories of people getting nauseous while in the theaters, nor our own reactions of “What was that” will sway you. It’s The Hobbit. It’s Peter Jackson. It will make hundreds of millions of dollars. ALSO NEW IN THEATERS: Central Park Five, [...]

RECOMMENDED: Congrats Hitchcock, you win by default. A whopping two films hit local theaters this week. You are one: The Sacha Gervasi directed, Anthony Hopkins and Helen Mirren starring biopic of one of film’s earliest and most well known auteurs that comes to screens at the Ritz Five and Rave Ritz Center. The other is [...]

RECOMMENDED: Pat Solitano has problems. He’s bipolar, his wife cheated on him, his Dad is a bookie who is a little crazy himself, and to top it all off, he’s played by Bradley Cooper and he lives in Delco (ZING!). But for real, dude is messed up in the head. And (as much as it [...]

RECOMMENDED: Look, with Hurricane Sandy coming through last week, we were supposed to see screenings of both Lincoln (out this weekend in limited release, not in the area) and Skyfall. Both screenings were cancelled or moved or we just couldn’t get there anymore, so we haven’t seen either film. Luckily for everyone, Skyfall is the [...]

RECOMMENDED: Robert Zemekis must have a thing for plane crashes. In both Flight (his first live-action film in 12 years) and Castaway (his last live-action film), the action of the story is set-up by an airplane doing not exactly what it is supposed to do. In Flight, that something is a plane flying upside-down. As [...]

RECOMMENDED: Like the novel it is based on, it can never be said that Cloud Atlas suffers from a lack of ambition. Three directors tell six interwoven stories that span centuries and involve the same souls, reincarnated and destined to keep bumping into each other throughout time and space. You know, a light-hearted romp. Lana [...]

RECOMMENDED : A few years ago, Jay Bulger became obsessed with Ginger Baker. Bulger tracked Baker down with a lie — that Bulger was a writer for Rolling Stone looking to do a profile on him — and ended up staying at Baker’s South Africa home and writing “The Devil and Ginger Baker,” which ended [...]

RECOMMENDED: This is one of those rare weekends of the year (which seem to get rarer each time around) where there are a few new movies in theaters we are more than a little excited to see, and number one on that list is Seven Psychopaths. Written and directed by Martin McDonagh, whose In Bruges [...]

RECOMMENDED: Liam Neeson should really stop travelling. Either his daughter gets kidnapped, or he gets asked about sports he’s never seen. And this time, his wife gets kidnapped. Or his daughter. Or both of them do. Or all three of them. Look, it doesn’t really matter. What matters is Liam Neeson looks to be once [...]

NOT RECOMMENDED: We did not see an advance screening of Hotel Transylvania this week. No, we do not feel that makes us unqualified to talk about how bad it looks (we’ve seen The Three Stooges, so we’ve become experts). Plus, this is less about Hotel Transylvania and more about Adam Sandler. WHAT HAPPENED? We know [...]

(MAYBE) RECOMMENDED: We are eternally grateful to the people who host these film screenings that allow us to make Film Sweat, specifically for one reason: We saw Paul Thomas Anderson‘s The Master last week, and it took us nearly all of those seven days between then and now to wrap our heads around it (we’re [...]

RECOMMENDED: [Scene: Philebrity office, mid-week, afternoon. Four in a room, all huddled around computers and laptops. After nearly 30 minutes of silence, the audio from the trailer to the new film The Words fills up the office, and the site's two editors begin to converse.] SWEENEY [Sighs heavily.] I don’t believe that Bradley Cooper could [...]

RECOMMENDED BUT, YOU KNOW, IRONICALLY SO: I’m gonna throw out a series of names and just let you conjure for yourself the unholy mess that Cosmopolis has to be: David Cronenberg. Don DeLillo. ROBERT PATTINSON. Juliette Binoche. Samantha Morton. PAUL GIAMATTI. Woooooo! The death of empire is such a bumpy road, folks. ALSO NEW IN [...]

NOT RECOMMENDED: We guess the logic here is this: Sly Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Dolph Lundgren, Jean Claude Van Damme, and Chuch Norris can no longer headline a film on their own, so let’s try to throw them all into the same film (Bruce Willis and Jason Statham on the other hand must have owed Sly [...]

RECOMMENDED: The name Ai Weiwei is not a household word, but trust us, you know at least something of his work. In his native China, he is both the nation’s most famous contemporary artist and its most outspoken critic. That he is both of these things in a land that is historically unkind to both [...]

NOT RECOMMENDED, SERIOUSLY, WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU: The failure (or just plain inability) of Zooey Deschanel to take on any meaningful film roles since Elf is not just something that affects her; you have a place in this too, you know. As adorkability turned into an industry, Manic Pixie Dream Girl is [...]

RECOMMENDED: Anyone who’s paying attention knows that, in just a few years, the Chinese will own us. But it’s the Swedish who’ve consumed our popular culture and are now in the process of spending the next decade feeding it back to us and, oh, how sweet it is. From folk music (Tallest Man On Earth) [...]

RECOMMENDED: Few filmmakers have climbed higher, faster than Christopher Nolan. It’s been only 12 years since Nolan’s first film with a real budget, 2000′s mind-bender Memento. Since then, he’s turned out a Pacino-driven thriller, a story of rival magicians notable for casting David Bowie as Nikola Tesla, a story about the maze of the mind, [...]

RECOMMENDED: With the surprise success of Midnight In Paris — which turned out to be Woody Allen‘s highest-grossing film ever — you can hardly blame the man for going back to the well for To Rome with Love, another postcard movie with a distinctly Woody spin. (See also: Vicky Christina Barcelona.) It’s a great little [...]

RECOMMENDED: Philebrity cannot wholeheartedly endorse any movie that is opening in the Philadelphia area this week. ALSO NEW IN THEATERS: Ted, featuring Marky Mark of Marky Mark & The Funky Bunch and a wisecracking animatronic bear in a film that had to, had to be borne out of the damage control that came in the [...]