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Despite his reputation as one of America's foremost "serious" filmmakers, Oliver Stone's name under the "director" caption does not guarantee a good movie. I learned that lesson while enduring the seemingly-endless tedium of The Doors, and was rem...

Sometimes, pure technical accuracy isn't enough. Sometimes, artistry has to be taken into account. One such case in point is Barry Levision's The Natural, arguably the best baseball movie ever made. The film works not because it is flawless in i...

Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, the first theatrical collaboration of Japanese animation icons Hayao Miyazaki (directing his second feature film) and Isao Takahata, led directly to the formation of Studio Ghibli, which was founded only a l...

Okay, no one anticipated that Need for Speed, the motion picture interpretation of the popular (and addictive) series of video games, would resemble Shakespeare. There was, however, a reasonable expectation that some of the adrenaline would transfe...

Neighbors contains many of the qualities that make raunchy, profane comedies a popular commodity: sex, T&A, drugs, a barrage of four-letter words, and slapstick of the broadest kind. At first glance, one might be tempted to lump Neighbors into the ...

Nell, Jodie Foster's return to dramatic acting following a flirtation with Maverick's action-comedy, is an entirely human movie. In this lush, green world of rolling hills and crystal pools, technology is an unwelcome intruder; civilization, a thr...

Watching Never Goin’ Back, I wasn’t sure whether this was intended to be a slice-of-life comedy, a coming of age drama, or a horror film. Since the first two don’t really apply – it’s not nearly as funny as it thinks it is and the ch...

It’s said that one of the reasons George Lucas deferred making the Star Wars prequels from the mid-1980s to the late 1990s is because the special effects technology he needed wasn’t available. I was reminded of this while watching Wolfgang...

Unconventionality is not always an asset and, in attempting to experiment with offbeat techniques to encourage viewer engagement, director RaMell Ross has inadvertently done the opposite, creating distance instead of immersion. In film, shaky cam-...

Night Swim looks and feels like one of those throw-away horror films that Blumhouse churns out with regularity. Last year, M3gan took the January pole position and lapped the pack, stunning with a $30M opening weekend and final domestic gross ...