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With a title like I am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, one might be forgiven expecting an exploitation flick, but this relic from the pre-Code era is actually a damning indictment of the American justice system during the interwar period. Although fi...

A lot of movies released into theaters deserve the label of "bad." Only a few cross the line into "reprehensible." Say hello to Identity Thief. The big problem with this overlong, tedious would-be comedy has nothing to do with the quality (or lack ...

In Secret, an adaptation of Emile Zola’s Therese Raquin, is an effective period piece thriller that incorporates love, lust, desperation, and madness into a stew thickened by a gothic atmosphere. The film’s shortcomings - the most notable of wh...

Since Liam Neeson began his action star career with Taken, most of his play-for-pay films have been depressingly generic. Although far from a revelation, In the Land of Saints and Sinners rises above many of those. Perhaps that’s because the...

In 1963, Frank Horrigan was among the "best and brightest" of the Secret Service, the personal choice of President Kennedy. On November 22 in Dallas, an afternoon that Horrigan will never forget, he became one of the few living agents to lose a pr...

Sometimes it's only through the greatest of tragedies and the gravest of injustices that human beings learn to relate to each other honestly and openly. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Jim Sheridan's searing In the Name of the Father, where ...

When I watch a comedy like The Incredible Burt Wonderstone, I find myself wondering whether plot and character development should be considered in an evaluation of the production. After all, the movie has been made with the intention of making peop...

Raiders of the Lost Ark was a nearly perfect action movie – upon its release in the early 1980s, it redefined the genre for decades to come. It also provided a trap for co-creators Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, forcing them to repeatedly tr...

It’s apparent that writer/director Brandon Cronenberg has a fascination with what constitutes identity. That question, posed existentially without the involvement of religion or spirituality, lies at the core of both Cronenberg’s dark, trippy ...

A perusal of the Coen Brothers' filmography reveals a penchant for the offbeat and absurd. They almost never do anything conventional, which makes Inside Llewyn Davis surprising. A Valentine to late-'50s and early-'60s folk music (pre-Dylan), the m...