David Edelstein

In No Strings Attached, Natalie Portman plays a medical resident who wants to sleep with her friend, played by Ashton Kutcher, with none of the messy emotions that come with a relationship. Critic David Edelstein says the film is calculated — and not particularly good.

Both The Green Hornet and The Dilemma open this weekend. The two big-budget male buddy pictures -- one starring Seth Rogen; the other Kevin James and Vince Vaughn -- illustrate that the juvenile "bromance" genre is just getting old.

Blue Valentine stars Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams as a couple in its final throes -- and also, through flashbacks, in more romantic times. Director Derek Cianfrance has previously made several documentaries. Critic David Edelstein says Cianfrance employs that documentary style in this film.

Fresh Air's David Edelstein couldn't limit himself to 10 movies for his Top 10 list -- he put 12 titles on this year's crop -- and explains why he parted ways with colleagues when it came time to hand out the annual New York Film Critics Circle Awards.

Joel and Ethan Coen's new take on the novel that inspired the 1969 film classic True Grit takes the story back out of John Wayne territory, setting it in a more brutal frontier and rendering it darker, colder, and more grotesque.

The fading junior welterweight boxer Micky Ward was working in construction in the early '90s when he decided to give the ring one more try. That's the story of The Fighter, starring Mark Wahlberg. David Edelstein says the boxing film is a mess -- which he means as a term of endearment.

In Darren Aronofsky's ballet thriller, a repressed ballerina must surrender to her sexuality to master Swan Lake's leading role. Critic David Edelstein says the dramatic film is a "camp classic -- like Showgirls remade by Roman Polanski."

Two gross-out movies open this weekend. Todd Phillips' buddy comedy Due Date and Danny Boyle's 127 Hours, about a hiker, played by James Franco, who has to chop off his own arm after he's pinned under a boulder. David Edelstein says the two films are "relentlessly in your face."

The third installment of Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy focuses once again on the corruption-fighting duo of journalist Mikael Blomkvist and cyber-avenger Lisbeth Salander. But as critic David Edelstein notes, an epic devotion to detail makes the movie seem like "an interminable footnote." (Note: Spoilers galore.)

Clint Eastwood's latest film is a supernatural drama about a factory worker with the ability to communicate with the dead. Critic David Edelstein says the film is too contrived to tell us anything enlightening about how to live in the shadow of death.