Here’s the bottom line on the latest in a seemingly never-ending series of Nicholas Sparks adaptations: It’s a piece of shit.

The trailers for Side Effects, director Steven Soderbergh’s new thriller, make it look like an indictment of all things pharmaceutical.

Nowhere will you find a more honest, searching and complex story told with such ease, care and compassion.

Here’s a serious question: Do we really need another zombie movie? Apparently we do.

Because of technical problems that I still don’t understand, only three of the five Oscar-nominated animated shorts were available to me at press time.

There’s enough story here to cover five movies, but The Rabbi’s Cat stuffs everything into 89 minutes. First, the cat meows. Then he speaks. Then he utters God’s name and is relegated to his previous “meow” (which has a distinct human quality to it).

The most affecting, touching and uplifting documentary of 2012 is Searching for Sugar Man. The other side of that documentary coin belongs to Beware of Mr. Baker, a movie about one of the biggest assholes—and greatest talents—ever to play music, drummer Ginger Baker.

Any time any American talks about being spied on by the government, that person should be forced to watch Barbara, a tense and quietly paranoid drama that takes place in East Germany in 1980. 

It’s a documentary, sure. But it’s not really a documentary, if only because this magical night didn’t take place in one night, and these kids’ parents seem like the kind who would look for their boys if they didn’t turn up at curfew.

It’s 1979. Two men meet in Los Angeles and quickly fall in love. One of the men, Rudy (Alan Cumming), the transplanted New Yorker who’s out and proud, works as the lead lip-syncher in a drag show at a West Hollywood bar.