Lou Lumenick is The Post's chief film critic. He has been reviewing here since 1999, after a stint as metropolitan editor, and covered films for the Bergen Record going back to 1981. A native of Astoria, Queens, who attended the City College of New York, he lives in Manhattan and has attended the Sundance, Toronto and Cannes film festivals, as well as events closer to home. Lou has frequently appeared on TV and taped introductions to a collection of classic films. He blogs at blogs.nypost.com/movies and rates "Casablanca'' as his favorite movie of all time.
Jay Roach’s “Dinner for Schmucks” is the first comedy satirizing that well known, if deplorable, American institution of businessmen inviting low-IQ individuals to parties where they are openly mocked. Just kidding —...
July 30, 2010 12:54 AM
Robert Duvall, that grand old man of the American cinema, has his juiciest role in years -- one that will surely be remembered come awards time -- as a crusty Tennessee hermit with a guilty secret in Aaron Schneider's...
July 30, 2010 12:00 AM
Zac Efron sees dead people -- and almost-dead people -- in "Charlie St. Cloud," a maudlin and unintention ally hilarious romantic wee pie whose main assets are Efron's baby blues and the even more lovely British...
July 30, 2010 12:00 AM
It's nice when a little reality is allowed to in trude into a family film. The current re cession drives the plot of the cute, well-made "Ramona and Beezus," based on a series of juvenile-fiction novels by Beverly...
July 23, 2010 12:00 AM
Enfant terrible Todd Solondz finally grows up with "Life During Wartime," which abandons the sopho moric shock-for-shock's-sake rut he fell into after a pair of remarkable debut features that seemed to announce a major...
July 23, 2010 12:00 AM
Visually striking but por tentous and pretentious, Danish director's Nicholas Winding Refn's follow-up to "Bronson" (this one is also in English) is pretty much a love-it or hate-it proposition. Refn's countryman...
July 16, 2010 12:00 AM
‘Whose subconscious are we going into exactly?” asks a character in Christopher Nolan’s sci-fi thriller “Inception.” This gets a big laugh in a sublime brain-twister of a movie that plays out so intricately on so many...
July 14, 2010 1:29 AM
The perils of lesbian parenthood include the sudden ap pearance of the children's sperm donor in "The Kids Are All Right," Lisa Cholodenko's ruefully funny, beautifully acted comedy of manners and unconventional...
July 09, 2010 12:00 AM
For nearly a quarter- century, outtakes from an industrial film showing a spectacularly foulmouthed motor-home salesman have circulated, first on VHS tapes among friends and more recently on YouTube, where more than 20...
July 09, 2010 12:00 AM
After 23 years and three attempts, "Predators" finally delivers a solid sequel to the Arnold Schwarzenegger B-movie classic. Following more or less directly from the original "Predator," this amounts to a...
July 09, 2010 12:00 AM
If M. Night Shyamalan sold his soul to the devil for the success of "The Sixth Sense," I think His Satanic Majesty has finally collected in full with "The Last Airbender," the writer-director's mind-numbingly dreadful...
July 02, 2010 12:00 AM
'Who do you think you are, the f - - - ing queen of England?" Joe Pesci asks Helen Mirren, who plays his wife in the well-acted but clumsy "Love Ranch," directed by Mirren's real-life husband, Taylor Hackford ("Ray")....
June 30, 2010 12:00 AM
The Afghanistan war's abrupt return to American headlines coincides with the long-planned release of "Restrepo," a gut-wrenching, politically neutral documentary that spends more than a year with a platoon of American...
June 25, 2010 12:00 AM
You’re a 30-something woman flying home to your sister’s wedding, and a cute guy you’ve just met assassinates all of the other passengers on your plane, as well as the pilots, and crashes it into a cornfield. Shortly...
June 22, 2010 1:22 AM
John C. Reilly, Marisa Tomei and Jonah Hill give such wonderfully satisfying, full-blooded performances in “Cyrus” that it seems almost churlish to wish this creepy little Oedipal comedy were a little more well-thought...
June 18, 2010 1:24 PM
Pixar Animation Studios has produced five movies I’ve described as masterpieces since 2001, so I’m not complaining too loudly that “Toy Story 3,” the second feature-length sequel in the studio’s history, is merely very...
June 18, 2010 12:08 AM
If you're not a fan of Bollywood movies -- which have long resisted crossover attempts in this country despite the success of hybrids such as "Slumdog Millionaire" -- Mani Ratnam's action melodrama "Raavan" probably...
June 18, 2010 12:00 AMBack in 2009, there were calls to boy cott the Sundance Film Festival because most of the money behind the successful attempt to ban gay marriages in California came from Utah. That ill- conceived boycott failed, and...
June 18, 2010 12:00 AM
Watching Joan Rivers relentlessly am bushing celebrities on the red carpet or hawking cheap jewelry on QVC, it's easy to overlook that this plastic surgery victim is a human being, or a groundbreaking comedian....
June 11, 2010 12:00 AM
It couldn't have been easy making a movie with less plot, character development and dramatic credibility than an episode of a campy '80s TV series. This feat is somehow managed by Joe Carnahan's overlong, overblown and...
June 11, 2010 12:00 AM
The absorbing documentary "Cropsey" -- taking its name from a bogeyman who has figured in Hudson Valley campfire stories for decades -- explores the creepy case of a homeless man convicted in two of many child...
June 04, 2010 12:00 AMInspired by her experiences as an editor at the Playboy Channel, Julie Davis' "Finding Bliss" is a mildly funny, stereotype-stuffed comedy about a straight-laced aspiring filmmaker who is forced to go to work for a...
June 04, 2010 12:00 AM
Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley play a superstar geneticist couple who at one point debate abortion in Vincenzo Natali's smart, scary -- and at times very funny -- horror movie "Splice." The fetus in question has...
June 04, 2010 12:00 AM
Alfred Hitchcock's films and TV shows of the late 1950s and early '60s are examined in the context of the Cold War in the delightfully quirky quasi-documentary "Double Take," which is a lot more fun and less academic...
June 02, 2010 12:00 AM
Thanks to a magic dagger that allows its user to go back in time and change history, “Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time” may be the first movie that effectively erases virtually its entire story line by the very last...
May 28, 2010 12:27 AMAfter a strange detour into World War I for "A Very Long Engagement," Jean-Pierre Jeunet, the French di rector of "Amelie," is back to more lighthearted whimsy with the delightful "Micmacs." The setting (again) is...
May 28, 2010 12:00 AM
Acting laurels went to Spain's Javier Bardem and France's Juliette Binoche yesterday at the Cannes Film Festival, where the top prize was copped by a Thai film about death and reincarnation. The nine-person jury...
May 24, 2010 12:00 AM
Cannes, France -- Major Oscar buzz and controversy greeted yesterday's premiere of "Fair Game," a depiction of the Plame-gate scandal and the only American film competing for the Palme d'Or, the top honor at the Cannes...
May 21, 2010 12:00 AMA rare drug-crime movie devoid of violence, and pretty much anything in the way of excite ment, Kevin Asch's middling "Holy Rollers" is inspired by the true story of Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn who were recruited into an...
May 21, 2010 12:00 AM
Michael Douglas, who has been playing self-destructive middle-aged anti-heroes with great skill since "Fatal Attraction" nearly a quarter-century ago, is superb as an auto salesman who sinks deeper and deeper into...
May 21, 2010 12:00 AM
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