Contributor: Paul Asay

Three decades ago, Richard Nixon went on trial: There was no judge, no jury—just glib British celebrity David Frost peppering the former president with questions. Some 45 million Americans watched on TV.

This star-studded, deeply religious film tells us the story of the Cristeros, an army of rebels that violently pushed against Mexico’s anti-Catholic policies of the 1920s. It asks an important question: Can violence serve the Prince of Peace?

I’m officially a twit. That’s what you call folks who use Twitter, right? I’m still new to this thing, so I’m not so sure of all the terminology. I never thought I would join Twitter. I never really saw the point, and anyone who’s read one of my movie …

English teachers across the country are going to want to show their students this updated literary fave. But star Angelina Jolie says she was ‘shocked’ when she saw the final product.

Two young lovers leave their homes and families and run off together. Problematic? Did we mention that they’re 12?

Ever wonder why there seem to be so many celebrities out there these days? Why every time you go to the supermarket you see about two-dozen different faces plastered across the tabloids? Some might say that more celebrities are just an upshot to our ce …

Davy Jones, meet Battleship. OK, so Universal Pictures’ titanic new release didn’t exactly burble to the box office’s briny depths this weekend: It only felt like it. Battleship fished an estimated $25.3 million from weekend moviegoers and floated to a …

Yesterday, Time’s movie critic Richard Corliss released what he considers to be “The 10 Greatest Movies of the Millennium (Thus Far).” The Artist launched the list at No. 10. Corliss named Pixar’s WALL-E as the best of the best. I love lists like these …

A whole lotta red pegs get stuck into battleships here. And while you’ve seen this kind of thing B-4, it’s still worth a review to C if this film’s stuck in row A or row F.

Reading can change our lives—quite literally, according to a new study. Researchers say that literary characters can have a sizable impact on how we think and act. Now, that doesn’t mean that Harry Potter readers are going to start shopping for cauldro …

A few weeks ago, Forbes magazine declared that Tony Stark—a.k.a. Iron Man—was worth a whopping $9.3 billion, making him the world’s fifth richest fictional character (one slot behind The Beverly Hillbilly’s Jed Clampett). If real-world dollars count on …

After gaining fame in a cult television hit from the 1960s, vampire Barnabas Collins has decided to inhabit the body of Johnny Depp in this Tim Burton comedy. Note that we said body, because this film has absolutely no soul.

I’m in the middle of reviewing the ABC show Scandal—a strange little drama that’s a little hard to box inside a recognizable genre (look for the full review tomorrow). It’s part episodic procedural, part serialized mystery. It’s got a little West Wing …

Well, we knew it was gonna be big. But this big? The Avengers, Marvel’s supersized superhero flick, didn’t just win the weekend box-office crown. It didn’t just make history. It pounded the record books like the Hulk tossed around poor little Loki. The …

For the last few weeks, we’ve been talking about seeing problematic or challenging movies. Not so much about how to decide whether you see them, but rather how to process them when you see them. Last week, I told you about some of the tools we use to h …