"I got dragged in kicking and screaming," Joe Berlinger is saying on the telephone. "It's the last film I thought I would make."

As workplace comedies go, Mike Judge's Extract is deceptive: never quite as funny as you wish, yet not without certain comedic pleasures.

The story filmmaker Berlinger tells is about the deadly despoiling of the Ecuadorian rain forest by Texaco -- now owned by Chevron -- and Chevron's refusal to accept responsibility for it.

9 is a computer-animated wonder, an apocalyptic action-thriller that's a little like The Terminator meets WALL-E

This film is so overheated -- even outlandish -- at times that you can't help but laugh at its histrionics.

The Other Man is a tease of a film, in which a husband discovers his wife's affair and makes a point of meeting his rival. However, it focuses on the hole instead of the doughnut.

The Toronto International Film Festival suffers from its own success. There are too many damned commercials before the start of each film.

Directed by Jason Reitman, Up in the Air puts Reitman at three for three, in terms of movies that manage to be both smart and wickedly witty. This film could easily put a second Oscar on George Clooney's mantle.

It's always nice to see old pros given the opportunity to ply their trade in new and revealing ways. Consider a pair of Christophers in films at the Toronto Film Festival.

Narrators don't come much more unreliable than Mark Whitacre in Steven Soderbergh's subversively funny and engagingly odd The Informant! Watching - a...

Sunday in Toronto saw three films back to back that offered powerful, sometimes disturbing ruminations on the idea of family.

It's rare that you see five films in a day at a film festival and hit all good ones. But as I settled in to Tim Blake Nelson's Leaves of Grass Monday ...

Charlize Theron, an actress who knows how to reveal herself without making a big deal of it, delivers an emotionally naked performance. It's a showcase role, but not a showy one.

Two problems: Cody's script is barely funny -- and what humor there is gets crushed by the heavy-handed direction of Karyn Kusama and the marginal acting skills of Megan Fox.

I have nothing against transgressive cinema; but Antichrist has the feeling of pushing buttons for its own sake, like a child smearing its own feces on a wall. Why does Lars von Trier do it?

Twenty years after he burst onto the scene, Steven Soderbergh considers what's changed in the intervening decades, and his upcoming film, The Informant!

Campion's film Bright Star is about the love of beauty -- particularly the ability of poetry to move the soul -- and about longing.

Part Parisian travelogue, part Robert Altman film, Cedric Klapisch's Paris is engaging without really being memorable.

Winning the Academy Award for Juno, Cody allows, made it easier to get Jennifer's Body produced.

Blind Date is strong stuff indeed -- a well-written and insightful drama built around two beautifully modulated performances by Stanley Tucci and the always-marvelous Patricia Clarkson.

Michael Moore's Capitalism: A Love Story is a scathing indictment of modern America's "me first" approach to the social contract. He may have made mor...

Clive Owen has never played a character dealing with problems as normal as the ones confronting Joe Warr, the sportswriter at the center of this film, which is based on a true story.

I interviewed Mike Judge shortly before his newest film, Extract, opened on Sept. 4 - and then I promptly misplaced the notebook with my notes from th...

Much has been written this past summer about the dumbing-down of Hollywood, the declining taste of the mass audience and the concurrent drop in the im...