Author: Kasey Butcher

Every now and then when I check the movie listings, I see a movie that I had never heard of before. Maybe I missed the trailers or maybe the marketing budget was tiny, but Chef was completely off my radar. I’m really glad that amongst summer . . . 

I went to see The Fault in Our Stars on a Tuesday evening in a movie theater peppered with impossibly young-looking teenage couples. Maybe it was my company or maybe it was the way John Green captures the voice of teenagers—for better and for worse—so . . . 

Recently, there has been a fair amount of backlash against so-called “pink princess culture” and some serious discussions about creating more complicated, significant roles for women, especially in children’s entertainment. With that . . . 

Years ago, Turner Classic Movies ran a bunch of old monster movies. The Creature from the Black Lagoon, The Thing, and so on. I recorded them on a VHS tape that ran out half way through King Kong (It wasn’t even the Peter Jackson version!). That . . . 

Like clockwork, you can count on superhero movies hitting the theaters in May. Newly released is The Amazing Spider-Man 2, a movie that offers some emotional moments and cool visual effects even as the plot tends to meander towards the climax.

The Amazing . . . 

I’ll admit that everything I know about football I learned from Kyle Chandler. I know enough about movies, however, to guess that a football movie that doesn’t include any football is probably not bound to be a classic.

Released ahead of . . . 

You probably know the story of Noah’s Arc from the Bible or nursery school. In Noah, however, director Darren Aronofsky (of Black Swan, Pi, and Requiem for a Dream) takes the ancient tale and gives it his trademark dark and phantasmagoric twist, . . . 

A long time ago (2004-2007), the CW aired a show that combined the hard-boiled detective of film noir classics and the teen drama that drew viewers to its primetime lineup. It was Nancy Drew meets Dick Tracy. The result was Veronica Mars, a gone-too-soon . . . 

I fly fairly regularly and in the boarding area, I like to play this game called “Please Don’t Let Me Sit Next to That Person.” I can be a bit cranky and I like to think that I’ve figured out a set of indicators for predicting . . . 

It seems fitting that the studios dump all their less successful projects at the height of awards seasons. Compared to the films up for Oscars, movies like Winter’s Tale remind us just how bad movies can really be. Normally, I have some affection . . . 

I can’t remember the last time I was this disappointed in a movie. Monuments Men boasts an all-star cast and a story about saving art from the Nazis. “How could it not be great?” I wondered. Yet, Monuments Men squandered its rich . . . 

As technology has evolved and become increasingly integrated into seemingly every facet of our daily lives, there have been studies about how it makes people more lonely or narcissistic, or connected. Spike Jonze’s Her takes a scientific Artificial . . . 

I’m a Disney Princess skeptic. As a kid, I loved all of the Disney movies, but as the princesses became a brand of their own, leading to seemingly ubiquitous merchandising, I started to find them tiring. This year, however, Disney created a princess . . . 

It doesn’t seem like it would be a holiday season anymore without the latest installment in some young adult franchise. This year, the latest Hunger Games movie, Catching Fire dominated the box office with its anxious continuation of the distopian . . . 

As a genre, romantic comedies are known for their predictability. The marriage plot even predates movies. About Time, the latest romantic comedy from Richard Curtis, director of Love Actually, uses an unlikely premise to highlight the unpredictability . . . 

The movie I really wanted to see was in limited release this week, forcing me to wait for the romantic comedy that promises to be a hit and instead venture into another horror flick, a sci-fi movie based on a book I’ve never read, or a comedy . . . 

From the first teaser trailer for Carrie, I couldn’t help but wonder why anyone would feel the need to remake this film. The 1976 version of Stephen King’s novel is not only a classic, it’s iconic. Referenced visually and verbally, . . . 

I think 90 minutes is a perfect movie length. Many of my favorite films clock in between 90 and 100 minutes-enough time to tell a story, but short enough to encourage cutting scenes that slow down the pace without adding anything. Gravity, the latest . . . 

This week, Prisoners, a psychological thriller starting Hugh Jackman, Paul Dano, and Jake Gyllenhaal, takes the torture techniques we’ve seen in military thrillers this year and uses them in a domestic setting, pushing the boundaries of familial . . . 

In The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Du Bois writes about “double consciousness,” as the way that African Americans were forced to look at themselves through the eyes of others, staying aware of white society’s demands for their behavior, . . . 

The family road trip disaster comedy is a tried and true framework for a summer movie, from National Lampoon to Little Miss Sunshine. We’re the Millers tries to put a new spin on the story by taking a quartet of misfits masquerading as a family . . . 

It’s a pretty common marketing tactic for horror movies to claim they’re the scariest movie of the year, but rarely can they deliver on that promise. The Conjuring, however, is actually the scariest movie I’ve seen in a long time. . . .