On Wednesday night Tim Burton gave the Film Society of Lincoln Center a 17-minute taste of Sweeney Todd, his film adaptation of Stephen Sondheim’s macabre musical. The 1979 Broadway hit was inspired by Victorian folklore about a crazed London barber who slits his customers’ throats and, in some versions of the story, colludes with his lover to bake the corpses into meat pies – which become wildly successful! (Ah, the culinary possibilities before rogue......

Movie blogger Jeffrey Wells counts 12 films about America’s entanglements in the Middle East coming down the pipe this year. It’ll be some feat if even one of them matches the urgency, power and electricity of Iphigenia 2.0, Charle’s Mee’s self-described “sampling” of Euripides’s Iphigenia at Aulis. You may know the essential storyline: Agamemnon’s army is left stranded en route to the Trojan War when the goddess Artemis stifles the wind to punish him for......

It's unfortunate that we have to read all these wonderful stories about Jerry Orbach in the many obituaries today, but Gothamist is heartened by the fact that many people, from fans to critics, as well as his peers, found him to be a great actor and a wonderful person. Gothamist thinks that was part of why we love Jerry so much, whether he was Detective Lennie Briscoe or Lumiere or Harry McGraw: He was wise......

Now, Gothamist hasn't been paying too much attention to The Village, the new M. Night Shyamalan film due out this summer, but we are fascinated by the attempt by the Sci-Fi Channel to create buzz by saying that the M. Night had "quit" the behind-the-scenes documentary about him and the film they were shooting. Jeffrey Wells from Hollywood Elsewhere noted a story by AP writer David Bauder (picked up Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel) that looked at the......

After writing about how the upcoming movie, Raising Helen, seems like a real stinker, not to mention a poor cousin-once-removed from other someone-dies-and-leaves-self-centered-person-with-baby movies like the superior Mostly Martha, Jeffrey Wells of Hollywood Elsewhere posted this thought from Village Voice writer Justine Elias:NYC subway grafitti on movie posters is always good for gauging public reaction. Along with some added moustaches, beards, eyeglasses, and blackened teeth (every movie poster gets some of that), I've seen one......

One of Gothamist's favorite movie columnists, Jeffrey Wells at Movie Poop Shoot, went to the Santa Barbara Film Festival and comes back with an interesting take on three of the discussion panels he attended (about screenwriting, directing, and producing). He notes an excellent exchange about the brilliant Reese Witherspoon-Matthew Broderick film, Election, during a panel about producing, which included producers of 21 Grams, Monster, Lord of the Rings, The Station Agent, and Cold Mountain, moderated......

And to make this travesty worse, you can feel the handsome little guy [Tom Cruise] "acting" with every fiber of his being. It's kind of unsettling. He resembles Sean Penn in "I Am Sam," except he seems to be shouting "I am Samurai." His face is a perpetual mask of scorn, his body a knot of anxiety, his eyes cranked down to laser glare. He's a poster boy for the concept of "trying too......

With the release of Matrix Revolutions this week, Gothamist spied this photograph of Larry Wachowski taken by movie columnist Jeffrey Wells at the premiere the other week. Now, after we looked at his rumored interest in getting a sex change, we can't help but think Wachowski does seem like that matronly Algebra II teacher we had in high school (Alan Horn, Warner Bros. CEO, is on the right). The Smoking Gun's document of the......

The upcoming release of Better Luck Tomorrow has critics and cultural scholars buzzing. A drama wealthy, Ivy League-poised Asian American teenagers who descend into crime, the film is sparking debate about how Asian Americans are supposed to be perceived. Some feel it's great, finally a way to get people seeing Asians as something else besides the model minority, while others are offended that Asians are being shown in an unflattering matter. At 2002's Sundance Film......

As a hopeless cinephile, I feel that the year I spend watching movies is like having a crush on some unattainable person. It makes me feel alive, with all the planning and dreaming and effort I put into it, and somehow, even when I see a bad movie, it�s okay, because it�s one of the knocks I take in wishing that maybe this in time, after paying $10+ for a movie, it might reward my......