Articles by Michael Phillips

To get to where you want to go, exploit “the cash box in your body.” Read more

A good film, one of a handful of dramatically viable and necessary features to emerge from America’s occupation of Iraq, came out of the Toronto film festival earlier this month. Read more

The celebrated theater director and playwright George C. Wolfe has spearheaded some dazzlingly cinematic works for the stage, including the musicals “Jelly’s Last Jam” and “Bring in ‘da Noise, Bring in ‘da Funk” – fluid, provocative, terrific shows. Read more

“Eagle Eye” is a thriller only a Global Positioning System could love. Read more

“Traitor” asks a question that can be answered only by that cruel mistress, the marketplace: How much moral ambiguity and narrative intricacy will an audience handle in the realm of a terrorism-themed contemporary thriller? Read more

Nothing in director Paul W.S. Anderson’s schlock drawer – not “Mortal Kombat,” not “Event Horizon,” not “Resident Evil,” not “Alien vs. Read more

A Frank Capra throwback for an era of diminished expectations, the amiable “Swing Vote” casts Kevin Costner as an unemployed egg processing plant worker who must decide the fate of the state of the union. Read more

Screenwriter Steve Conrad likes his protagonists to suffer a little en route to finding a better place and not in the usual sitcomic ways. Read more

Greasy, hazy good fun, 2004’s “Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle” got by on a 4 a.m. Read more