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Byline: Adam Mazmanian - Special to The Washington Times How do wicked witches get that way? In the age of the fairy tale, this was not a particularly relevant question. [...]

Byline: Adam Mazmanian, SPECIAL TO THE WASHINGTON TIMES The big studios and name-brand actors offered some of the biggest triumphs of 2013. This wasn't a year for breakout indie movies, [...]

Byline: Adam Mazmanian, SPECIAL TO THE WASHINGTON TIMES David O. Russell's bold, exhilarating American Hustle, a fictionalized look at the Abscam scandal of the late 1970s and early 1980s, has [...]

Byline: Adam Mazmanian, SPECIAL TO THE WASHINGTON TIMES In Inside Llewyn Davis, the Coen brothers let their natural pessimism run rampant against the backdrop of the Greenwich Village folk music [...]

Byline: Adam Mazmanian, SPECIAL TO THE WASHINGTON TIMES The black-and-white of Alexander Payne's masterful film Nebraska seems to depict a forgotten, bygone version of the Upper Midwest, with endless prairies, [...]

Byline: Adam Mazmanian, SPECIAL TO THE WASHINGTON TIMES A star-studded comedy about childhood friends reconnecting as septuagenarians, Last Vegas makes for breezy, heartwarming viewing. A demographically driven film designed to [...]

Byline: Adam Mazmanian, SPECIAL TO THE WASHINGTON TIMES Machete don't tweet. Machete don't smoke. Machete mostly speaks in terse sentences, mostly on the subject of what Machete don't do. Machete [...]

Byline: Adam Mazmanian, SPECIAL TO THE WASHINGTON TIMES Who is J.D. Salinger, the man behind Holden Caulfield? An angry, narcissistic recluse? A shell-shocked combat veteran who could never chase the [...]

Byline: Adam Mazmanian, SPECIAL TO THE WASHINGTON TIMES A dark comedy based on a novel about a Mafia family in the witness protection program hiding out in France, The Family [...]

Byline: Adam Mazmanian, SPECIAL TO THE WASHINGTON TIMES More than most films, Short Term 12 dissolves the divide between itself and the audience. The performances are so wrenching and so [...]

Byline: Adam Mazmanian, SPECIAL TO THE WASHINGTON TIMES Probably it's best to ignore the variety of improbable occurrences that launch this sweet and winning meta-fictional retelling of Pride and Prejudice. [...]

Byline: Adam Mazmanian, SPECIAL TO THE WASHINGTON TIMES Planes is a down-market cousin of Pixar's visually stunning Cars franchise. The production values, storyline and voice talent are slightly degraded from [...]

Byline: Adam Mazmanian, SPECIAL TO THE WASHINGTON TIMES There are more than a few explosions in 2 Guns, but what really ignites this schlocky, good-natured action comedy are the easygoing [...]

Byline: Adam Mazmanian, SPECIAL TO THE WASHINGTON TIMES On its face, The Heat looks like a warmed-over hash of stale movie formulas. While the film is true to the conventions [...]

Byline: Adam Mazmanian, SPECIAL TO THE WASHINGTON TIMES There's nothing like a dead parent or two to kick off a children's story. Literary and cinematic orphans from Tom Sawyer to [...]

Byline: Adam Mazmanian, SPECIAL TO THE WASHINGTON TIMES The Great Gatsby is the Hope Diamond of American cinema - priceless, enviable, impossibly tacky and bad, bad luck. Many filmmakers have [...]

Byline: Adam Mazmanian, SPECIAL TO THE WASHINGTON TIMES The movie version of MidnightÃÆs Children is a labor of love, and that love helps make it better than it probably has [...]

Byline: Adam Mazmanian, SPECIAL TO THE WASHINGTON TIMES The latest film from firebrand social realist Ken Loach, the story of a rare whiskey heist pulled off by a gang of [...]

Byline: Adam Mazmanian, SPECIAL TO THE WASHINGTON TIMES The Host has all the makings of a cult classic. Years from now, when its core audience of tweens has grown up, [...]

Byline: Adam Mazmanian, SPECIAL TO THE WASHINGTON TIMES The time seems ripe for a film adaptation of the classic countercultural novel On the Road as a corrective for the current [...]

Byline: Adam Mazmanian, SPECIAL TO THE WASHINGTON TIMES Nobody plays obtuse like Steve Carell. The part of a self-absorbed, burnt-out Las Vegas magician like Burt Wonderstone is tailor-made for the [...]

Byline: Adam Mazmanian, SPECIAL TO THE WASHINGTON TIMES No casts a darkly comic eye at an ad campaign that helped unseat Chile's entrenched military dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet. In 1988, [...]

Byline: Adam Mazmanian, SPECIAL TO THE WASHINGTON TIMES To take a kindly view, Parental Guidance, a dopey comedy about how generation gaps play out in parenting styles, could have been [...]

Byline: Adam Mazmanian, SPECIAL TO THE WASHINGTON TIMES Performances of rare and enduring power fuel Rust and Bone, the story of a chronically unemployed bare-knuckle street fighter and a marine [...]

Byline: Adam Mazmanian, SPECIAL TO THE WASHINGTON TIMES The latest generational comedy from raunch auteur Judd Apatow is notable for a few riotously funny set pieces, but it drags at [...]

Byline: Adam Mazmanian, SPECIAL TO THE WASHINGTON TIMES This offbeat tale of presidential romance is a high-toned dud - a surprise, given its talented cast, scandalous subject matter and trim [...]

Byline: Adam Mazmanian, SPECIAL TO THE WASHINGTON TIMES In the opening credits to the television series Alfred Hitchcock Presents, the iconic director is shown in silhouette walking into a caricature [...]

Byline: Adam Mazmanian, SPECIAL TO THE WASHINGTON TIMES Ang Lee manages to take an unfilmable story and suffuse it with astonishing energy in his adaptation of Life of Pi. Shot [...]

Byline: Adam Mazmanian, SPECIAL TO THE WASHINGTON TIMES Movie versions of Abraham Lincoln typically aspire to the granite face etched into Mount Rushmore, or the gangly, youthful rail-splitter of folk [...]

Byline: Adam Mazmanian, SPECIAL TO THE WASHINGTON TIMES Of all the movies ever made about a man's quest to lose his virginity, The Sessions may be the oddest and the [...]

Byline: Adam Mazmanian, SPECIAL TO THE WASHINGTON TIMES Smashed, a slight, tenderhearted film about a hard-drinking young woman who risks her marriage to try to get sober, is presented in [...]

Byline: Adam Mazmanian, SPECIAL TO THE WASHINGTON TIMES Writer-director Martin McDonagh In Bruges ) wants to have his darkly comic cake and eat it too with Seven Psychopaths, a gory [...]

Byline: Adam Mazmanian, SPECIAL TO THE WASHINGTON TIMES Tim Burton returns to one of his very first directorial projects for the quirky and sweet Frankenweenie, the story of a boy [...]

Byline: Adam Mazmanian, SPECIAL TO THE WASHINGTON TIMES Like an actual wallflower, this movie of teen angst takes pains to conceal its true depth. Set in suburban Pittsburgh in the [...]

Byline: Adam Mazmanian, SPECIAL TO THE WASHINGTON TIMES Other than being mind-bendingly implausible and trite, there's not that much wrong with Trouble With the Curve, the story of an aging [...]

Byline: Adam Mazmanian, SPECIAL TO THE WASHINGTON TIMES Movies about novelists frequently fall into the trap of trying to visualize the act of writing. From the point of view of [...]

Byline: Adam Mazmanian, SPECIAL TO THE WASHINGTON TIMES Intriguing but numbing and visually stunted, David Cronenberg's film adaptation of Cosmopolis captures the weary philosophical deadpan of Don DeLillo's 2003 novel [...]

Byline: Adam Mazmanian, SPECIAL TO THE WASHINGTON TIMES The Odd Life of Timothy Green has all the attributes of a family movie - it's gentle, earnest and told in broad [...]

Byline: Adam Mazmanian, SPECIAL TO THE WASHINGTON TIMES According to South African record-store owner Stephen Segerman, a search through a liberal white South African's record collection in the mid-1970s reliably [...]

Byline: Adam Mazmanian, SPECIAL TO THE WASHINGTON TIMES The dead of the Cristero War, a three-year long civil uprising in Mexico by militant Catholics against restrictions placed on worship by [...]

Byline: Adam Mazmanian, SPECIAL TO THE WASHINGTON TIMES 'The Intouchables,' a wildly successful French comedy that trades on racial cliches, manages to be charming and offensive at the same time. [...]

Byline: Adam Mazmanian, SPECIAL TO THE WASHINGTON TIMES The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel is a kind of geriatric take on the familiar British multirelationship comedy - think Four Weddings and [...]

Byline: Adam Mazmanian, SPECIAL TO THE WASHINGTON TIMES Made on a budget of next to nothing, with no special effects, Sound of My Voice is one of those movies that, [...]

Byline: Adam Mazmanian, SPECIAL TO THE WASHINGTON TIMES A sweet-natured comedy about a reluctant pontiff, We Have a Pope bumbles from set piece to set piece without getting anywhere. Its [...]

Byline: Adam Mazmanian, SPECIAL TO THE WASHINGTON TIMES 'Chimpanzee' is wonderful to watch, but horrible to listen to. The new documentary from Disney offers some of the most captivating nature [...]

Byline: Adam Mazmanian, SPECIAL TO THE WASHINGTON TIMES The Cabin in the Woods is gleefully subversive, in both its dissection of genre conventions (horror movie geeks will delight in its [...]

Byline: Adam Mazmanian, SPECIAL TO THE WASHINGTON TIMES Near the end of The Innkeepers, a low-budget ghost story set in a decaying New England inn, it begins to dawn on [...]

Byline: Adam Mazmanian, SPECIAL TO THE WASHINGTON TIMES Grim, unsentimental and unsparing, Shame is an up-close look at a man trying to negotiate everyday life with a crippling sexual compulsion. [...]

Byline: Adam Mazmanian, SPECIAL TO THE WASHINGTON TIMES Martin Scorsese's first foray into 3-D filmmaking is audacious, reverential and visually astonishing. As a cinematic experience, it is miles ahead of [...]

Byline: Adam Mazmanian, SPECIAL TO THE WASHINGTON TIMES Despite some superficial similarities including a nearly identical title, two hunky midlist lead actors and a storyline about a shadowy ring of [...]