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No reasonable person could expect the long-gestating Spinal Tap II to match the comedic brilliance of the 1984 classic This Is Spinal Tap. Still, it’s disheartening to see just how far Rob Reiner’s follow-up has fallen. While the film does deli...

Spotlight is a Valentine to investigative journalism and a stark reminder of where we’re headed now that this brand of writing has become an endangered species. The film is unique in that it focuses almost entirely on the process. The character...

The cinematic landscape has become so cluttered with the biopics of musical legends (and a few that fall into the “legends in their own mind” category) that the tendency is to shun these chronicles of hard times and inner struggles in favor of...

Summer is the season of bloat and the trait is evident in Spy's excessive running length. At about 90 minutes, this would have been a fresh, breezy action-comedy. However, with an additional half-hour of padding, viewers are forced to endure stre...

The foundation of any good family drama is interesting characters, and The Squid and the Whale is replete with them. Movies about divorce and dysfunctional families are so commonplace that it's difficult to avoid slipping into clichés yet, as a re...

There was a time when it was considered "daring" or "risky" to make a comedy-tinged war movie. In the early 1950s, with the scabs from World War II still in evidence and the United States enmeshed in Korea, war didn't seem to be a lighthearte...

The saga is complete. What George Lucas began in 1977 as a little movie that took the box office by storm, he has completed in 2005 with the most heralded motion picture of the year. With the arrival of Revenge of the Sith, Lucas places the missi...

Revenge of the Sith is the most technically accomplished of all the Star Wars movies. Putting aside other important aspects of the cinematic experience (like storytelling, for example), it’s hard to argue that the special effects work in the th...

It wouldn’t be much of a stretch to label Star Wars as one of the biggest cultural influences of the last half-century. The 1977 release of A New Hope had a seismic impact on the film industry and the ripples expanded far and wide. For 36 years...

Going into Stay, I was aware that the director was Marc Forster, the man who made Monster's Ball and Finding Neverland. However, even with that knowledge, it wouldn't have surprised me to see David Lynch's name during the closing credits. Stay is...