The fact that Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen’s 1952 Singin’ in the Rain was later to inspire art as different from itself and as unignorable as both Michael Jackson’s Black or White music video and Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange suggests that maybe, as legend would have it, it really is the greatest movie-musical of 
Oliver Stone’s cinematic command turns Savages, his 19th film, into a reconsideration of his entire previous oeurve. Its story of three white California-carefree progeny whose post-hippie, post-yuppie initiative into the drug trade conflicts with a Mexican cartel recalls Stone’s past hits: the martyred youth Vietnam saga Platoon, the hyperbolic satire Natural Born Killers, the noir-sinister 
2012’s best so far and Sarris remembered This year, I want to do the Mid-Year Reckoning differently, as a tribute to film critic Andrew Sarris’ recent passing. It was Sarris, during my grad school years at Columbia, who wisely advised that the percentage of good movies has not changed from the old days; now that 
So what if Channing Tatum started as a stripper? The problem with Magic Mike, the semi-autobiographical melodrama he co-produced, is that he couldn’t find a filmmaker to properly translate that beefcake experience to the screen. Whatever Tatum knows about working-class ambition and exploitation (personal or Hollywood style) gets lost in director Steven Soderbergh’s affectless look 
If you didn’t get the Memo to hate Adam Sandler, his new movie That’s My Boy would seem another likable, if minor, entry in his continuing series of unexpectedly challenging human comedies. The anti-Sandler Memo is a follow-the-leader pact–not literally a missive but an unconscious social ideology that protects Hollywood’s status quo. It perverts honest, 
In tabloid parlance, Mathieu Demy is cinema royalty. Son of the late, great French new wave director Jacques Demy (Lola, Bay of Angels, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg), he is also the son of Agnès Varda, the pioneering female director of the Left Bank who excels in fiction and nonfiction films (Vagabond, The Gleaners and I). 
The title of The Skinny refers to gossip–the low-down between friends–but read another way (in the credit sequence’s colorful graphics) it also refers to sexual opportunities in New York City. Writer-director Patrik-Ian Polk is interested in the erotic possibilities found by five young black gays, recent Brown University graduates, who reunite during New York’s Pride 
The Indie film movement may have some high points (your call) but it also commits innumerable disasters such as Your Sister’s Sister and Peace, Love and Misunderstanding. Each plot is undistinguished but Your Sister’s Sister’s plot is so poor it exposes how the Indie movement’s grave lack of imagination unfortunately replaces Hollywood’s formerly sure-fire storytelling. 
