When Whitney Houston sings “His Eye is on the Sparrow” in Sparkle, her performance is unexpectedly good, stirring gospel. Playing the mother of three talented daughters who have formed a singing group that unravels the family, Houston’s heartbroken recitation also seems to be meta-cinematic. Drawing on her character’s professional disappointment, she testifies to something beyond the 
Citizen Kane or Vertigo, which is more fun? Now that Sight & Sound’s decadal critics poll has given the #1 spot to Vertigo, toppling Citizen Kane (to #2), it confirms that film culture as we used to know it has toppled as well. Citizen Kane held sway as the “Greatest Film Of All Time” for so long that a lot of people 
A better movie than The Dark Knight Rises would invite discussion of its content, but interpretation (“What’s that?” say Avengers fans) isn’t even required of this third entry in Christopher Nolan’s Batman franchise. A film of empty spectacle, its actual content (formulaic violence, humorless dialogue, unvarying solemnity) runs second to the blatant process of supplying 
How Internet fanaticism over The Dark Knight Rises overtakes film culture Already, The Dark Knight Rises has caused movie media to embarrass itself. Those front page headlines in both the Daily News (four stars) and New York Post (four stars) are heralds of film journalism’s decline into boosterism. It’s happened before and will happen again. 
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 
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, 
