Post-Dispatch Film Critic
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Like its hero, &quot;Alexander&quot; is bold and ambitious, destined to be debated by future generations. It&#39;s also tragically flawed.
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Our pop-culture critic comments on the convention.
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The best film so far about the cost of war in Iraq
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The Monitor's film critic asks whether a nonfiction film can truly be unbiased.
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When the worst movie director ever challenges his web critics to a boxing match, four idiots actually meet him in the ring. By Chris Baker from Wired magazine.
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Tycho:  "Live Free Or Die Hard" is a movie where a man drives a car into a helicopter, and that may be all one needs to know about it.  For some reason, regardless of what is present in the strip, I found myself quite able to place my brain in neutral and roll down the film's gentle, sloping grade.  I thought that Gabriel would be proud that I had done so, but he was not.  He held the film to some higher standard, and on a very specific topic - its presentation of technology and technology culture.  I know, right? Look out your window; there's probably frogs and blood and shit.
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A first look at the much-delayed film's poster.
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A silent cinema revival glories in black-and-white imagery and rich live music for postmodern tales. It makes an "unfilmable" Lovecraft classic a piece of cake. By John Brownlee.
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Letters The postbag, and your miscellaneous musings
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If the measure of a movie&#39;s realism lies in its ability to make you physically uncomfortable, Closer is about as real as it gets.
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Fine performances from a stand-out cast punctuate this post-9/11 cinematic offspring. But Ladder 49 overkills on melodrama -- the slow-paced adventure flick has enough tear-jerking Hallmark moments to extinguish a three-alarm blaze.
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Take a look at the top movies stories this week!
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When everything gets an API then everything you can imagine will be possible if you can write a script.  And sometimes, to give you an idea, all that has to happen is that a wall come down. The latest, most intriguing such wall was the paywall at the NY Times. Now all of a sudden we find the wealth of information published by the NY Times over many decades is available without tariff. More important, we can point into the archive. We've gotten so accustomed to the wall, that you actually have to think when it may be possible to go in there, as if it left behind a wall in our minds, even after the wall on the web is gone. For example, the first episode of Ken Burns's The War, an epic series about World War II from the American perspective, cited several NY Times articles. If you looked carefully you could see the dates, and the actual headlines, and then if you have a browser handy, as I do (I have an iPhone) you can actually read the article while the narrative continues. Today this is mostly a gimick, but I suspect as we get used to having history so available (like having a library microfilm machine, which I used to spend whole days playing with when I was a kid) it will change our sense of information, perhaps as much as anything else that's ever been on the web. Take movie reviews for example. What a thrill to be able to read a review of a movie that I love that came out in 1932! The reviewers back then were more forgiving, less sarcasting, more enthusiastic. Consider their review of the Hollywood Revue of 1929, a favorite of mine that I've only seen once (I'd pay for a DVD, if it were available). They loved audible movies (that's what they called them) as if the term "talkie" was as elusive as "podcast" was in the summer of 2004. Again, we've just scratched the surface. Wouldn't you like to have NY Times movie reviews integrated with Netflix? Or have Yahoo's movie rating service available on the NY Times site. And I have to wonder whether they really have gone all the way. You can't see the reviews unless you're logged in. Can Google's robots, therefore, see the movie reviews? Unless the've made some special arrangements, it seems not.  It would be helpful to get a technical guide to the newly hatched NY Times on the Web, or (as in the old days of software) a reviewer's guide, so we get some ideas of what to look at. Clearly a lot of work went into opening up the Times archive. I'm going to be in NY the week of October 8 and will have some time toward the end of the week. If anyone at the Times would be willing to spend some time with me reviewing what's now open, that would be helpful. In any case, at least the Times today is somewhat more available to be integrated into the fabric of the web. That's some progress. How much, remains to be seen. Postscript: Kottke did a great job of skimming the surface of the newly opened Times when it first came online, just one week ago today.
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The photo on the front page (Feb. 13) is Pulitzer quality. I suggest you nominate Mike Terry for that award. The photo has urgency, drama, composition and is alive with tense action. It is one of the best photos you have published.
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All the best of the week's movies stories
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I'm a big fan of Richard Stallman and his work â even though, the first time I interviewed him, he proceeded to criticise my questions before answering them, not a journalistic experience I'd had before.  Without his vision and sheer bloody-mindedness in the face of indifference and outright hostility, we would not have the vast array of free software we enjoy today.
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The destruction of New York City in action films may not be appealing to many American moviegoers, but it plays well overseas.