In a healthier film culture, Garbo the Spy would make history. Its great pleasure is that it remakes history: telling the real life story of a WWII counterspy Joan Pujol Garcia through the sophisticated use of fictional film footage. It was Garcia who misled the Nazis about a planned maneuver at Calais—misdirection that facilitated the American’s D-Day landing on 
CityArts Editor Armond White addresses the current controversy between critics and Hollywood about The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. The issue industry-forced “embargoes” on reviews is not “inside baseball” shop talk. It effects the way movies are sold and received in the entire culture. White rips away the naivete that has confused journalists, bloggers, gossip columnists 
Pariah is such a decent film it is a shame that its title seems designed to keep people away. The “P” word title is too close to Precious, the abomination that set-back the recent cultural progress. In Pariah, debut writer-director Dee Rees tells a coming-of-age story rooted in the family and social customs of black 
Armond White looks back at the best movies that surpass and defy the year’s worst We’ve reached the point where movies are less popular than other forms of pop culture yet remain compelling—as much for what they recall about the humanities as the inhumanity they routinely deliver. Thus 2011′s year-end mania for the specious cultural 
Todd Graff’s Joyful Noise tells the story of a Pacashau, Ga., church choir entering a gospel music competition against better-financed groups. It’s an underdog fable that neatly parallels Graff’s own career since directing his 2003 debut filmCamp, the under-appreciated—yet secretly influential—pop music celebration set at a training school for young musical theater aspirants. This time, Graff gets 
Movie watching can never be the same after the doubleheader of Steven Spielberg’s The Adventures of Tintin, his first animated film, and his live-action War Horse. Each film upgrades the way our imaginations construct the world, the way we see ourselves in the digital age. All art devotees should recognize the history being made. Tintin, 
George Lucas’ sales tactics for Red Tails, his $93 million production about the Tuskegee Airmen, the first African-American pilots in the armed forces, make a bigger bang than the film itself. On the publicity rounds, Lucas has talked about the dearth of movies with African-American heroes, promising that Red Tails will give black teens the kinds of on-screen 
Count Our Idiot Brother among Paul Rudd’s poor choices—a select group of dumb to unbearable films including The Shape of Things, Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Dinner for Schmucks that waste the actor’s estimable gifts. Rudd’s commitment to playing off-center characters who combine nerdiness with idiosyncratic charm has made him a new kind of romantic comedian. 
The Sitter confirms director David Gordon Green’s unexpected yet healthy career turn. His 2000 debut George Washington, about the out-of-reach desires of black and white kids in the modern impoverished South, introduced a sweet yet somber regional lyricism. It was followed up by several atrocious art-movies for the indie festival circuit until Green gradually revealed a raucous 
As a children’s film, Martin Scorsese’s Hugo is overwrought and under thought. Its story of Hugo (Asa Butterfield), an orphaned boy who lives in a Paris train station where he surreptitiously maintains the clock mechanisms, suggests a fantasy autobiography. He wants to think of himself as a child of cinema, always working behind the scenes at the 
