American Hustle opens with a long, silent scene as Christian Bale, playing a medium-time conman named Irving Rosenfeld, gazes into a mirror while carefully arranging his toupee onto his weirdly bald head. The symbolism in the scene is obvious: Rosenfeld looks like an actor preparing to go on stage. As we soon find out, he has in fact been engaged… read more!

Partly inspired by real events, Amsterdam takes place only fleetingly in its titular city during an early flashback, set shortly after World War I; the bulk of the story is set in New York in 1933, where glass-eyed physician Burt Berendsen (a very likable Christian Bale) and attorney Harold Woodman (John David Washington, handsome and wooden as usual), best pals… read more!

Hollywood's love affair with Massachusetts continues with what is at least the fifth 2010 drama set in the Bay State, joining other prestige pictures such as The Social Network, The Town, The Company Men, and Shutter Island. The energetic Fighter heads upstate from Boston and unfolds its story mostly in the town of Lowell, home of boxer Micky Ward (Mark… read more!

The fall of 2004 is notable for bringing the American public the fourth releases from three quirky writer-directors who all arrived on the independent scene at the same time: Wes Anderson (Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, and now The Life Aquatic), Alexander Payne (Citizen Ruth, Election, About Schmidt, and now Sideways), and David O. Russell, who last made the… read more!

Bradley Cooper plays Pat, a supposedly likable everyman suffering from bipolar disorder. Released from a psychiatric hospital into the custody of his parents (Jackie Weaver and Robert De Niro, whose superstitious Pat Sr. is almost as crazy as his son), Pat is completely manic, and singularly obsessed with reconciling with his wife, whose lover he had beaten to a pulp… read more!