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For a movie like Here, which eschews the norms of narrative filmmaking in favor of something experimental, the first question to ask is whether the story, stripped bare of the director’s approach, is worth telling. The second question is whether...

In 2001, only a few months after the fall of the World Trade Center, Peter Jackson swept us away to Middle Earth with The Fellowship of the Ring. It was a wondrous three-hour achievement: the first major attempt at serious, big budget epic fantasy....

In 2005, genre fans were able to celebrate the day when the entire six-film Star Wars saga was available for public consumption. Nine and one-half years later, the same can be said of Peter Jackson's Middle Earth epic. As George Lucas learned, th...

Special effects have always played an important role in Peter Jackson's adaptations of J.R.R. Tolkien's books but, with The Desolation of Smaug, the middle chapter of The Hobbit movie trilogy, they take center stage. This isn't necessarily a positi...

Televangelism and those who practice the dubious form of money-driven religiosity represent low-hanging fruit when it comes to satire. A lot of the material – Jimmy Swaggert crying crocodile tears, the eyes of Tammy Faye, etc. – comes across a...

During the late 1980s and early 1990s, when Disney was undergoing the resurgence that would transform it from a sputtering bastion of family entertainment into the juggernaut is has since become, there was arguably no more important creative v...

Out of respect for the stunning visuals and family entertainment value of Disney's 34th animated feature, I can do no less than recommend The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Sadly, however, this is the least-enjoyable animated feature to come from th...