Film

Jeff Nichols and Ramin Bahrani made names with small, low-budget movies: Nichols with Take Shelter and Bahrani with Man Push Cart. Both have now directed big-budget films with big stars: Nichols' Mud features Matthew McConaughey, and Bahrani's At Any Price stars Dennis Quaid and Zac Efron.

Known for rom-coms, the actor, currently starring in Mud, is taking on more dramatic roles.

Joseph Kosinski's sci-fi adventure, starring Tom Cruise, is the most incoherent piece of storytelling since John Travolta's Battlefield Earth. It had critic David Edelstein crying, "What? What?" over the din of the explosions.

A documentary airing tonight on PBS tells the story of the five young black and Latino men wrongly convicted of the 1989 assault and rape of a white female jogger in Manhattan's Central Park. Ken Burns made the film with his eldest daughter, Sarah Burns, and David McMahon.

The director's latest cinematic meditation on the meaning of life stars Ben Affleck, Rachel McAdams, Olga Kurylenko and Javier Bardem and revolves around the question of how we might locate the presence of God in the everyday and how we can accommodate ourselves to our expulsion from the Garden.

P.J. Hogan's new movie is madder than madcap, a zany, nonconformist boundary-pusher whose offbeat manner makes for a rich and grounded film. Toni Collete plays the part of a modern-day Maria von Trapp as if she has nothing to lose -- and Anthony LaPaglia shows his true Aussie accent.

Fresh Air remembers the film critic and bon vivant Roger Ebert, who died Thursday, with a roundup of interviews from our archive -- one with Ebert alone, one with him and his late partner Gene Siskel, and two in which Ebert interviews iconic directors. Plus, critic-at-large John Powers discusses Ebert's 2011 memoir Life Itself.

A new documentary looks at obsessive fans of Stanley Kubrick's 1980 horror film The Shining, starring Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall. These fanatics look for hidden meanings in the movie, and while some of their theories sound outrageous, it's too simple to call such thinking deranged.

In a new book about movie stardom and fame, Boston Globe film critic Ty Burr looks at the evolving history of the relationship between movie stars and the people who love them, and at how changing technology influences the kinds of stars the public wants.

This macho action film starring Gerard Butler and Morgan Freeman is a vigilante fantasy about terrorists and turncoats invading the United States. It's a popular genre, but critic David Edelstein says he's tired of the American addiction to these tropes.

Harmony Korine's Spring Breakers, Sally Potter's Ginger & Rosa and Cristian Mungiu's Beyond the Hills are wildly different films, yet they share a common impulse: to demonstrate indelibly how for girls, behaving outrageously is still a political act.

There are three reasons to see this prequel to the classic 1939 film The Wizard of Oz: the trio of witches played by Mila Kunis, Rachel Weisz and Michelle Williams. But James Franco, who stars as the wizard-in-the-making, disappoints — and the film as a whole is a bit snoozy.

In the 1950s, as movie directors were trying to offer TV watchers something they couldn't get on a small screen, Cinerama films threw three simultaneous images onto a curved screen to create peripheral vision. Two classic Cinerama films — This Is Cinerama and Windjammer — are now out on DVD.

The film is ripe with a creepy-crawly feel that would be affecting if the tone weren't so arch. Directed by Park Chan-wook, written by Wentworth Miller and starring Nicole Kidman, Mia Wasikowska and Matthew Goode, Stoker is a vile little chamber horror, says critic David Edelstein.

Director Dror Moreh interviews six former heads of Israel's Shin Bet security service in his Oscar-nominated documentary. The men look back on their work and conclude that continued Israeli occupation of the Palestinians will not resolve the conflict.

In the Chilean film No, which is nominated for Best Foreign Language Film, a young ad man devises a campaign to vote the dictator Augusto Pinochet out of office using rainbows and catchy theme songs.

In Paolo and Vittorio Taviani's new film, Caesar Must Die, a group of prisoners put on Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. It's barely an hour and a quarter, and it's physically small-scale, but it's so compressed it wears you out -- in a good way.

The actor, nominated for an Academy Award for his role in David O. Russell's film, talks about watching movies with this father as a kid in Philadelphia, his childhood fascination with soldiers and being up against Daniel Day Lewis for an Oscar.

Every seven years since 1964, the director has caught us up on the lives of 14 everyday people in his acclaimed 7 Up series. Apted was 22 when the series began, and the subjects were 7. In the latest episode -- 56 Up -- the subjects are well into middle age.

The Oscar-nominated documentary directed by Dror Moreh is not a defense of Israeli security policy, but a critique. The six Shin Bet heads Moreh interviews may believe in the tactics they devised, but it's the overall strategy they think is flawed.