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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...

It’s a fair assessment that my overall unfamiliarity with Indian cinema may have amplified some of my criticisms of Mani Ratnam’s Nayagan (or, as it is also known, Nayakan). Two aspects that I found to be distracting – the oddly-placed mu...

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...

Welcome to cyberspace, the newest locale for the action-adventure film. Borrowing heavily from Alfred Hitchcock and John Grisham, director Irwin Winkler reduces a potentially-fascinating premise to the spearhead of a routine thriller. The Net sta...

In motion pictures, there are essentially three types of satire: a fatuous, silly kind that emphasizes jokes to the exclusion of all else; a lightly comic approach that gently pokes fun at issues while developing a plot and characters; and a vicio...

In 1971, following the release of Diamonds Are Forever, Sean Connery announced that he would "never again" play the role of James Bond. As a result, the producers brought in Roger Moore, and the series continued. 12 years later, in 1983,...

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...

Spoiler Alert: To the extent that the term "spoiler" can be applied to something this formulaic, I suppose I ought to warn readers that I talk in general terms about how the movie ends. What do you get when you mix A Christmas Carol with a subst...