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Our Brand is Crisis is about an election but in many ways it plays out like a boxing movie told from the perspective of the trainer. The cynical, satirical edge is entirely appropriate for the world of politics in which style trumps substance and the...

Watching Out of Africa a quarter of a century after its release, it's almost impossible to guess how it won the Oscar for Best Picture. There's little doubt that this is a feast for the eyes and ears. The pairing of John Barry's lush score with D...

Apparently, it isn't enough for a plague to be the villain. A microscopic entity, "one billionth [human] size" with the potential of wiping out the population of the United States in 48 hours, doesn't represent a sufficient threat. Therefore, Out...

The Overnight plays like the pilot of a sitcom developed for Netflix or premium cable. A hit-and-miss affair that deals in a sporadically amusing fashion with many of the mundane (and a few not-so-mundane) tribulations of long-term monogamy in marria...

Pacifiers are for infants. The same is true of The Pacifier. In fact, "infantile" may be the best single word to describe this Kindergarten Cop wannabe. Vin Diesel is better than the material, but, no matter how hard he tries, he can't rise abov...

How's a studio to proceed when it wants to do something with a classic, family-friendly property but believes a straightforward remake to be redundant? The solution, as recently explored by several would-be franchises, is to expand the canvas. Ma...

Paper Towns is the third coming-of-age story to reach screens during the summer of 2015, following in the wake of the vastly superior Me and Earl and the Dying Girl and Dope. Based on the novel by John Green, Paper Towns is an exercise in artifice. T...

It's a risky proposition for any artist (director, author, etc.) to humanize a terrorist. In an era when many things have been reduced to black-and-white, the word "terrorist" has become synonymous with "evil." And evil can only be demonized. Becau...

When discussing "giants" of the non-English-speaking, international film world, four names leap immediately to mind: Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, Akira Kurosawa, and Satyajit Ray. Of these men, Ray has received the least North American e...

Nostalgia - many movies (especially sequels to long-lasting franchises) trade in it to one degree or another. Few films, however, rely on its impact as strongly as The Peanuts Movie, the first big-screen outing for Charlie Brown & friends since 1...