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, 
Call Larry Gagosian You belong in museums —Jay-Z, “That’s My B**ch” Jay-Z dreams of collapsing the class and race divisions reflected in high art and pop art hierarchies. Reverse the title of Kanye West & Jay-Z’s love song from their Watch the Throne album (“That’s My B**ch”) with that of the Gagosian’s Picasso retrospective (L’amour 
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 
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 
