Life is almost always more interesting in the movies than it is in reality. That’s because Hollywood uses artistic license to entertain us, by embellishing the truth and engaging us with concepts just plausible enough to be real. No place is this truer than in the spy film genre, which is filled with globe-trotting action heroes like James Bond, Jason Bourne, and Ethan Hunt. These characters incite epic car chases, gunfights, and explosions wherever they go, relying on elaborate gadgets in order to accomplish their respective missions. Their films are hardly realistic, but not entirely ...

I’m disappointed to report that I didn’t love Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes sequel “A Game of Shadows.” The first half hour is pretty boring, and although the action picks up pretty heavily toward the middle, Ritchie seems to care more about style than substance in the film. He continues to use Sherlock’s own bullet-time type slow-mo combined with crazy forced perspectives of bullets and shells being shot from guns, which admittedly is pretty darn exciting at times.

What the movie lacks though is the same great banter between Watson and Holmes that was present in the first film. Holmes...

Two Jews on Film - By Joan Alperin Schwartz: While I was watching 'Mission Impossible - Ghost Protocol' directed by Brad Bird, in IMAX, a thought kept drifting through my mind. Why am I finding this film so boring? Why does everything look so familiar?

It wasn't until the drive home that it hit me... Of course, everything looked so familiar because I've seen it all before. The stunts, the chases, the fights, the plot and that is why I found 'MI4'... BORING.

Okay, to be fair not completely boring, but I was expecting so much more.

First there's the plot. The Kremlin has been bombed by a t...

1. Best Picture: ''Atonement,'' ''Juno,'' ''Michael Clayton,'' ''No Country for Old Men,'' ''There Will Be Blood.''

2. Actor: George Clooney, ''Michael Clayton''; Daniel Day-Lewis, ''There Will Be Blood''; Johnny Depp, ''Sweeney Todd the Demon Barber of Fleet Street''; Tommy Lee Jones, ''In the Valley of Elah''; Viggo Mortensen, ''Eastern Promises.''

3. Actress: Cate Blanchett, ''Elizabeth: The Golden Age''; Julie Christie, ''Away From Her''; Marion Cotillard, ''La Vie en Rose''; Laura Linney, ''The Savages''; Ellen Page, ''Juno.''

4. Supporting Actor: Casey Affleck, ''The As...