The advertised appeal of ABC's Canadian import Motive is that it's a "whydunnit?" rather than a "whodunnit?," giving its audience a glimpse at the identities of both the victim and the killer before any of the story's detective work begins and having the reason for the crime be the focus of its mysteries. Unfortunately, this gimmicky premise quickly renders the show a "whocares?,"…

By: Mike LeChevallier

Nicolas Winding Refn's Drive arrived at an opportune moment. Coming off a decade where the American genre film devolved into lowest-common-denominator investments and blockbusters ballooned skyward on the backs of sequels and franchises, Refn's modest exercise in crime pastiche and car-chase nostalgia parlayed both the exhaustion of Hollywood's narrative resources and—perhaps more importantly—the gathering mainstream curiosity in independent music'…

By: Jordan Cronk

Disgraced ex-congressman Anthony Weiner is running for mayor of New York City. Meanwhile, crack-smoking Toronto mayor Rob Ford has "ruined [his] city's reputation for good." The third annual Critics' Choice TV Award nominations have been announced. Time's new cover story explores "The Angelina Effect" and the impact of her choice. Reporting from Cannes, our friend Keith Uhlich calls Behind the Candelabra a masterpiece. Zach Galifianakis'…

By: R. Kurt Osenlund

Epic is bound to be scolded for its script's rampant rip-offs, which can be traced to The Borrowers, The Wizard of Oz, Fern Gully, The Lord of the Rings, and Honey, I Shrunk the Kids (charges of Avatar copycatting are sure to abound as well, but since that film was already epically derivative, such criticisms don't seem fair). The screenplay's real problem, though, isn't in the tales it apes,…

By: R. Kurt Osenlund

Though adapted by James Clavell and W.R. Burnett (along with an uncredited Walter Newman) from Paul Brickhill's nonfiction account of the 1944 Stalag Luft III escape, John Sturges's The Great Escape is equally inspired by a great fiction. The filmmaker's treatment of the massive POW escape from a camp in Nazi-occupied Poland alludes to the faux civility of warfare that Jean Renoir depicted with equal fury and eloquence in Le…

By: Chris Cabin

Both Takashi Miike's muscular chase flick Shield of Straw and Johnnie To's wildly compounded romantic policier Blind Detective make an asset out of their respective pillaging of genre signifiers. That these individual films succeed to varying degrees—in some instances in spite of themselves—matters little in the grand scheme of their creators' narratives: Each have made more original films, more consistently…

By: Jordan Cronk