A story of Tolstoy’s final days, starring Christopher Plummer, Helen Mirren, James McAvoy and Paul Giamatti, opens tonight at Naro Cinema.

A 10-year veteran of film criticism and local writing says farewell.

“Imaginative” is the first word that comes to mind when discussing Avatar, and “boring” is the other.

Even the cooks don’t hold the secret. The grandparents come in once a week and create the arcane mix of herbs and spices that go into every giant pot, then presumably disappear into an ethereal mist before they return to work their magic again.

Gran Torino is a coming of age parable for the Thao character, but the theme can be extended to Eastwood himself, whose talent evolved on celluloid.

Agreeing that all corporate pizza tastes like ketchup on cardboard, my anonymous pizza agents and I excluded the likes of Pizza Hut and Dominos from our experiment. But with dozens of local pizza joints in the Seven Cities, where do you begin? Ranking our pies on the key elements of Crust, Sauce and Topping, we determined to eat our way to the answer.