Winter's Bone (movie)

Broadly speaking, a film festival's programmers can handle news of a new lineup one of two ways: all at once, or nearly; or the drib-drab approach. The Chicago International Film Festival goes for the dribs and drabs. The 48th edition of founder and...

The Bathtub is a place of myths and wonders, a broken down teardrop of Louisiana marsh and mud in"Beasts of the Southern Wild"and the setting for an extraordinary new drama whose fierceness, like its 6-year-old heroine Hushpuppy, grabs on and won't let...

August 15 Goodbye They say all good things must come to an end.  With that, I'm leaving WDBJ and the news business.  I've accepted a position as the community relations coordinator for Roanoke City Schools.  There are several reasons why I'm switching...

Like Freeway, the lovable stray dog at the center of this very teary comedy, "Darling Companion"has lost its way. Even the marquee ensemble anchored by Diane Keaton, Dianne Wiest, Kevin Kline and Richard Jenkins is not enough to rescue this motley mutt of...

OK, I didn't read the books, but let me just say, as pure movie entertainment,"The Hunger Games"is a "wow." This dystopian drama portrays a society where 24 children between the ages of 12-18 are randomly selected for an annual survivor/gladiator-style...

LOS ANGELES (KTLA) -- Katniss Everdeen may be engaged in a savage battle in "The Hunger Games," but there's little doubt about the victor in a different arena: the box office. The film raked in $155 million in North American ticket sales in its opening...

Every dollar Disney won't get at the box office for the $250-million “John Carter” will probably end up in the pockets of Lionsgate and the other entities behind “The Hunger Games” (which allegedly cost less than half as much). The...

Jennifer Lawrence is relishing her last few weeks of anonymity. The 21-year-old actress understands that her starring turn in"The Hunger Games" is about to change her life. Opening Friday, the highly anticipated film, faithfully adapted from Suzanne...

When you're talking about "The Hunger Games," it all comes down to Katniss. Like other strong-minded women who have driven book sales into the stratosphere — think Lisbeth Salander of the "Dragon Tattoo" triology and even Bella Swan of the...

I read Suzanne Collins' addictive, massively popular novel "The Hunger Games" so compulsively that the pages feared my fingers. Any filmmaker would be challenged to similarly create scene after scene that sparks craving for the next. In other words,...

The hypocrisy at the heart of "The Hunger Games" is irresistible. Novelist Suzanne Collins, whose trilogy has been decreed "awesome" by, among others, my 5th grade son, indicts violence and organized brutality as tools of mass-audience manipulation. Yet...