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What movie-goers find funny has changed since the end of the silent era. Many of the pratfalls and hijinks that so delighted audiences in the 1910s and 1920s have long since ceased to provoke anything more full-bodied than a chuckle. Neverthel...

Let me begin this review of the 2016 Ghostbusters remake by pretending there was no 1984 iteration. How enjoyable would the film be if it didn’t have such enormous baggage, if it didn’t emerge under the long shadow of a beloved predecesso...

Giant makes for an interesting case study of a "classic" American motion picture. Although it was a huge financial success for Warner Brothers, the prints were allowed to fall into a shocking state of disrepair over the years. And Giant's reputat...

Spoilers follow, although those who have read the book won’t be bothered by them. Although The Girl on the Train is a serviceable thriller, it’s hard not to see it as something of a disappointment. As a B-movie whodunnit designed for f...

Sports movies, with all the requisite clichés attached, are a dime a dozen, and no one has done them better in recent years than Disney. With every year, the roster lengthens, and now includes all of the four major sports, plus golf. The thing t...

Few screen romances are as touching, as tragic, and as life affirming as the one shared by Nick (Robert Carlyle) and Karen (Juliet Aubrey) in director Michael Winterbottom's Go Now. While the film is ultimately about the effects of multiple sc...

The concept of a movie being “so bad it’s entertaining” is often employed as a way of disparaging a film that doesn’t work in the way the director planned. It’s a valid description but the word to focus on is entertainin...

Rags to riches stories are a Hollywood staple. They’ve been around for as long as movies have been around because viewers love a yarn about how a ne’er-do-well, propelled by a combination of luck and hard work, makes good. It’s a dr...

The Golden Door might have worked better as a documentary. The subject matter - that of third-class immigrants making their way to the New World at the beginning of the 20th century - is fascinating material, and director Emanuele Crialese include...

With 1964's Goldfinger, the third James Bond story to reach the screen, the "Bond formula" had reached maturity. Screenwriter Richard Maibaum, a participant in the scripting of the previous two movies, Dr. No and From Russia with Love, had id...