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With all apologies to It's a Wonderful Life and Miracle on 34th Street, Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol is probably the best-loved, most often retold Christmas story of them all. There's something in its message of spiritual rebirth an...

The stylistic approach employed by director/co-writer Aneesh Chagantry – that of having the movie screen show only what’s on a computer’s desktop – is both Searching’s greatest asset and its most significant drawback. Although observ...

At the tender age of seven, Josh Waitzkin (Max Pomeranc) becomes fascinated by the game of chess. Without giving up little league baseball, he learns how to play, hanging out with Vinnie (Laurence Fishburne) and a group of speed chess hustlers...

It's the 14th century somewhere in the middle of Europe. In the name of verisimilitude, the filmmakers of Season of the Witch have covered everyone with dirt and filmed only at night and on cloudy days. At times, it looks like Monty Python and the ...

To the extent that there’s a difference between “big screen cartoons” and “animated features,” The Secret Life of Pets 2 comes closer to the former than the latter on the spectrum of non-live-action motion picture entertainment. The ...

About 20 minutes into The Secret Life of Pets, an entertaining but inconsequential animated movie, I was struck by a powerful feeling of déjà vu. It didn’t take long for me to ascertain the cause. The Secret of Pets is pretty much...

One could make a compelling argument that The Secret Life of Walter Mitty does what a good remake should do: it takes the essential premise of the original and, while retaining some of the names and touchstones of its predecessor, moves in a new di...

In content, setting, and cast choice, The Secret of Roan Inish is a departure for writer/director John Sayles. The creative force behind such memorable and diverse films as Matewan, City of Hope, Eight Men Out, and Passion Fish, has taken pen and ...

Secretariat joins Disney's pantheon of sports movies about underdogs that defy odds and become champions. Of all the movies in this group (which includes Remember the Titans, The Rookie, Invincible and Miracle), this is the least effective, in lar...

By wedding comedy with tragedy in intricate, realistic unions, Mike Leigh has become one of the foremost film making voices for the British working class. Yet, even though his movies bring a certain social viewpoint to the screen, this in no way l...