Two men sit on the stage at Montpelier’s Lamb Abbey in velvet-upholstered chairs sipping aperitifs. Dressed in a pimpalicious checked jacket, J.D. Ryan enjoys an adult beverage as he discusses his passion for the 500 spaghetti Westerns Italian filmmakers sautéed together between 1965 and 1975.... Read more

April comes as a great, green relief to Vermonters who’ve been cooped up indoors for six months. But this April also offers the outwardly bound a few good reasons to stay inside. In the dark. From April 16 through 26, three eco-themed documentary films will be screened at local venues.... Read more

Some childhood pleasures and fears we bring with us into adulthood, and others we leave behind so thoroughly they might as well be fins or a tail. A few short years turns the kids who shuddered through R.L. Stine novels into teenage connoisseurs of slasher movies.... Read more

As I noted in my review of Baby Mama, a major problem with the movie industry is that it’s designed to take in creative artists who’ve proved their talent and reward them with the opportunity to churn out mainstream nonsense for big-time bucks. You know a movie blows when it makes Tina Fey look like a hack for hire.... Read more

Independent movies are touted as the risky alternative to test-marketed Hollywood fare, so it’s dispiriting to see one that doesn’t take a single risk. Brought to us by the producers of surprise hit Little Miss Sunshine, Sunshine Cleaning is conceived with so little imagination that it feels like the product of a Screenwriting 101 course.... Read more

Miramax executives had a tough decision to make: Having financed Greg (Superbad) Mottola’s third feature-length project, which turned out to be a 100 percent raunch-free coming-of-age romance, would they market it as the tender, semiautobiographical tale that it is? Or would they abandon every principle of truth in advertising and con the public into believing Mottola made Superbad 2? You can smell their pants burning from here.... Read more

The Class is not an easy sell. It’s long. It’s talky. It’s subtitled. But anyone who teaches or has a strong interest in the future of public education should see it. And moviegoers who can appreciate last year’s Cannes Palme d’Or winner as a documentary (which it almost is) will find it offers winning insights on how people clash and compromise, in or outside school.... Read more

Being John Malkovich has never looked like this much fun. The actor delivers one of the most entertaining and deceptively complex performances of his career in writer-director Sean McGinly’s The Great Buck Howard, the story of an old-school mentalist oblivious to the fact that he’s a relic of a bygone show-biz era.... Read more

In the little-seen 2007 comedy I Could Never Be Your Woman, Michelle Pfeiffer plays a TV producer who sleeps with Paul Rudd and turns him into a sitcom star. Watching it, I was startled — not by the age difference between the two (hey, it’s Michelle Pfeiffer), but by the notion of Paul Rudd as an unsung comic genius. In the 1990s, his handsome face graced a slew of movies without making much impression.... Read more

2008 was the year of the dog. In the past 12 months, canine comedies have rolled off the Hollywood assembly line seemingly every week. Bolt, Beethoven’s Big Break, Hotel for Dogs, Snow Buddies, Marley & Me — the list goes on and on.... Read more