Twenty-six-year-old Lena Dunham is not the slacker/wannabe writer she plays in the hit HBO series “Girls” that she stars in, created and currently directs. Although the current darling of the...

For many leading roles, especially those written for females, likability is key, and their ability to charm is pivotal to their film’s opening weekend. For Jessica Chastain, who plays determined...

Few shows last year drew more insipid criticisms than Lena Dunham’s “Girls,” which burst out of the gate with a roaringly funny pilot and charges varying from nepotism to racism. No matter...

The first film I saw in 2012 was Joe Carnahan’s riveting “The Grey,” and the last was Gareth Evans’ action masterpiece “The Raid: Redemption.” In between, an extremely...

Surrealism is usually a cinematic touch that rubs me the wrong way; something about the level of self-indulgence and intentional audience disconnect is simply grating. But Leos Carax’s “Holy...

Horror films have to choose a style and stick with it. It is tough to navigate between the jump scares of slasher lore, the slow burn or the haunted house jamboree, but “V/H/S” makes full use...

All of the best films are, in one way or another, “about something.” Not content to simply tell their stories, the movies work in some sort of thematically sound message or moral about today’s...

As someone whose experience with the “Universal Soldier” franchise is limited to 3 a.m. channel-surfing and Wikipedia, I feel qualified to say that the seventh film in the franchise, “Universal...

To call “Life of Pi” a challenging novel to adapt would be an understatement. It is a deeply emotional work where much of the conflict is internal and much of the action consists of a boy and...

Austin Meyers, a UT radio-television-film graduate, manipulates faces, redesigns streets and changes landscapes as a compositor for the hit HBO show “Boardwalk Empire.” Using computer-generated...