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It's easy to understand why the original Magic Mike was a success: the not-too-cheesy, not-too-serious story of a male stripper featured plenty of beefcake, high-energy dance sequences, standout performances from Channing Tatum and a manic Matthe...

Magic Mike’s Last Dance exemplifies Hollywood’s obsession with established properties. When Steven Soderbergh released Magic Mike in 2012, it was designed as a stand-alone film with a beginning, a middle, and an end. However, its box office suc...

The infamous background about the post-production woes of The Magnificent Ambersons is perhaps as interesting as the story told in the film. And, to add flavor to an already-spicy dish, movie critics and historians, in their zeal to lionize legendar...

Call it the law of diminishing results. Akira Kurosawa’s 1956 classic The Seven Samurai (the first time this story was made into a movie) is a great film - a contender for one of the best 100 motion pictures of all time. (It’s at #32 on m...

As a portrait of a romance in the throes of disintegration, Malcolm & Marie offers a balanced and heartbreaking examination of why it’s never easy to assign “fault” when love goes sour. Malcolm (John David Washington) is a narcissist who...

Maleficent might best be described as an alternate universe re-imagination of Sleeping Beauty. Taking a page from Wicked (the stage show that presents Oz from the witches' perspective), Linda Woolverton's screenplay presents an inverted version of ...

This review contains (oblique) spoilers.When Disney released Maleficent in 2014, it was a fresh approach to the Sleeping Beauty story – a live-action re-interpretation of the fairy tale with the supposed villain recast as a sympathetic figur...

Malena, the latest film from Italian director Giuseppe Tornatore, is a curious mix of whimsy and tragedy. Tornatore's blending of the divergent tones is not entirely successful - there are several jarring moments - but, on the whole, Malena works ...

Mama follows an unfortunate recent pattern that has emerged in low-budget horror films, especially those with PG-13 ratings. It starts out strongly, using evocative visuals and an unsettling backstory to establish a creepy tableau, but it proves un...

Mamma Mia! delivers exactly what one can reasonably expect from it. It's a faithful adaptation of the stage play of the same name but, more importantly, it's a repository for ABBA songs - nearly two dozen in total. Considering that the average ru...