Warning: This post contains spoilers about J. Edgar. For the past few years, I haven’t been much of a fan of Clint Eastwood’s work. While he no doubt possesses storytelling skills as a director and certainly maintains an incredible presence as a movie star, I’ve found that critics who constantly praise his work often overlook its general lack of finesse, tired and sometimes visionless formal approach, and habitual ham-fistedness. When watching Eastwood’s work, I get the impression, supported by stories of his uniquely economic method of filmmaking, that he thinks of himself as something of a Woody Allen for the prestige studio drama, able to get difficult stories right in one take. The end product, for me, says otherwise. While I was a fan of the strong but still imperfect Mystic River (2003) and Letters From Iwo Jima (2006), the moment that I stopped trusting Eastwood came around the time the song “Colorblind” appeared in Invictus two years ago, throwing any prospect of nuance and panache out the window. Eastwood, despite having helmed several notable cinematic successes, has recently been coasting on a reputation that doesn’t match the work. He is, in short, proof of the auteur problem: that we as critics forgive from him transgressions that would never be deemed acceptable with a “lesser” director. As you can likely tell, my expectations were to the ground in seeking out the critically-divided J. Edgar. I was prepared, in entering the theater to watch Eastwood’s newest, to write an article about [Due to Content Scraping and Theft, we have been forced to try abbreviated feeds. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and woud very much appreciate you clicking through to view the full article on FilmSchoolRejects.com]

With the release of Pixar’s Up, last year saw a great deal of conversation surrounding the ghettoization of animated movies at major awards shows. This debate resulted in something of a minor, qualified victory for animated cinema of 2009, as Up was the first animated movie to be nominated for Best Picture since Beauty and the Beast, but then again it sat amongst a crowded bevy of nine fellow nominations, and animated films remain unthreatening to their live action competitors because of the separate-but-unequal Best Animated Feature Category. I’d like to take this space to advocate for the big-category acceptance of yet another marginalized and underappreciated category around awards time: non-fiction films.

This week’s Culture Warrior gives an exhaustive review of the decade that you won’t find anywhere else on the Interwebs.

The successful biopic is something that takes a truly masterful hand to accomplish, but not many movies do it well. This week’s Culture Warrior asks why.

After impressing audiences around the world in Inglourious Basterds, it looks like Waltz will be exhausting his English for The Green Hornet.

Arriving with the loud crash of silence, the MTV Movie Awards seem to have been taken over by the Disney Corporation this year. Most of the awards seem fair, but Best High School Musical Movie seems to be a loaded category. Complete winners inside!

Another week, another fine selection here at the now-teetering-on-monthly Blu-ray Report. This week we get hit with some Role Models, some old school Batman, a gay rights activist and Cartman, all in HD.

Brian Gibson loves to buy DVDs. Come with him on his weekly journey into the depths of credit card debt as he tells you what to buy, rent and avoid.

First of all I need to preface this post by saying that I don’t believe the Oscars matter in the least. Sure, they’re fun to vote on, discuss, and are (apparently) a great excuse to party on a boat, but, ultimately, whoever takes home the gold at the end of the night only matters to those who actually attended the ceremony.

The lovely folks over at Focus Features are really excited about their film Milk being nominated for 8 Academy Awards. Who wouldn’t be, right? And to celebrate all of their nominations, including Sean Penn’s Best Actor nod and one for Best Picture, they have put together two brand new featurettes.

We’ve heard your reactions to the Oscar nominations, now here what some of the nominees have to say.

Fans of The Dark Knight were pleased to find out that The Producers Guild of America (PGA) nominated it as one of the five best films of the year, right alongside Slumdog Millionaire, Frost/Nixon, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Milk.

No one likes a sell out. But selling out goes both ways. This time of year, directors sell out in a different way. I’m talking about all the major mainstream Hollywood directors who “sell out” to do the award film released at the end of the year.

Are you an awards season junkie? Do you love to be able to sit there and look smart in front of your friends and family, most of whom only make it out to the movies once a year to see the latest Jim Carrey comedy, by being able to talk endlessly about all of the “important” movies of the year? If so, consider this your awards season to-do list.Fr

The big news of the hour is that The Day the Earth Stood Still made $31 million at the box office over the weekend. That’s a first-place finish all right, but well below what a lot of people thought it would make.

Yesterday the Los Angeles Film Critics Association announced their 2008 awards, recognizing Pixar’s WALL-E as best picture.

In the wake of California’s Proposition 8, a film like Milk is both socially relevant and an eerie reminder of how this nation hasn’t really progressed in the past 30 years.

Kevin Carr looks at Australia, Four Christmases, Transporter 3 and Milk, in theaters this week with the FSR Report Card.

It’s the Big, Fat Thanksgiving Special! Kevin and Neil beam into the Magical Virtual Studio in the Sky two days early to get ready for their Thanksgiving feast which will keep them napping through the weekend.

Kevin and Neil struggle to make it through a show by not talking about any movie opening wide this week… because the only one out there is Bangkok Dangerous, and the studio didn’t screen it for them.