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.
Drew Barrymore and Justin Long may be a sometimes couple in real life, but the truly dire "Going the Distance" is the latest of many romantic comedies demonstrating that such relationships do not necessarily translate...
September 03, 2010 12:00 AM
Paul and Sandra Fierlinger's "My Dog Tulip" is an animated film about a dog, but don't take the kids unless you want to give them some fairly explicit lessons about canine mating and excretory habits. "Marmaduke" it...
September 01, 2010 12:00 AM
You could make a worse choice for a late- summer popcorn movie than "Takers," a Michael Mann-ish heist thriller with a pulse-pounding foot chase and some terrific stunt work offsetting its hackneyed plot and dialogue....
August 27, 2010 12:00 AMRob Reiner's low-key, early teen romance "Flipped," which in some ways manages to evoke a pair of his long-ago hits ("Stand By Me" and "When Harry Met Sally"), is interesting enough that you wish it were better....
August 27, 2010 12:00 AM
Pigs fly and perform a Busby Berkeley-style water ballet. Maggie Gyllenhaal sports a posh British accent. Everybody steps in dung repeatedly. These are the high points of "Nanny McPhee Returns," an overlong and...
August 20, 2010 12:00 AM
A shaky lead performance is the least of the problems with Bruce Beresford's "Mao's Last Dancer," which recounts the true story of Chinese ballet star Li Cunxin's defection to the US in the schmaltziest TV-movie terms...
August 20, 2010 12:00 AM
Despite an impressive literary pedigree, a fitfully amusing “The Switch” — Hollywood’s third artificial-insemination comedy of the year — ranks somewhere between the barely watchable “The Back-Up Plan” and the good but...
August 20, 2010 12:00 AM
Extremely unsettling and thought- provoking, Yael Hersonski's "A Film Unfinished" puts an unfinished, hour-long film shot in Poland's Warsaw Ghetto in 1942 under the microscope. Discovered in the Nazi archives...
August 18, 2010 12:00 AM
A year-long, around-the-world quest for self-fulfillment that basically goes nowhere, “Eat Pray Love” is a very shallow, very glossy 2½-hour travelogue starring a miscast Julia Roberts as a spoiled, self-centered...
August 13, 2010 12:39 AMThe always interesting Patricia Clarkson in a rare lead role and Egyptian scenery are attractions not to be casually dismissed in "Cairo Time," a low-key and slow-moving romantic drama from Syrian-Canadian director...
August 06, 2010 12:00 AM
Just because George Gallo's "Middle Men" falls short of its appar ent goal to be the "Boogie Nights" of In ternet porn doesn't mean this loosely fact-inspired serio-comedy isn't far more entertaining than you'd expect...
August 06, 2010 12:00 AM
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
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