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In 2014, Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Like Father, Like Son missed the #1 spot on my annual Top 10 list by a whisker (it was one of three films that year to which I awarded four stars). A few years later, his Shoplifters topped the l...

Note: An argument can be made that this review contains spoilers for New Moon. For those who have read the book, there is no spoilage. For those who have watched the trailer, there is no spoilage. For those who don't fit into either of those cat...

Spoilers! Yeah, I talk about the ending. Although the name makes it sound like a monster movie (which it could be, after a fashion), Tyrannosaur is actually a member of a peculiar class of film unique to the U.K.: the "feel bad" tale of working...

Angelina Jolie's sophomore effort as a director is a high-profile adaptation the true-life book Unbroken (written by Laura Hillenbrand, the author of Sea Biscuit). Those unaware that the film is based on historical events might understandably ass...

Unfinished Business is bad - not epically bad but bad enough. Little contained in this misfire of a film works and the few successful things are dragged out to the point where they die a lingering death. In fact, it's odd that this movie was acco...

Yes, Unknown is preposterous. That in and of itself is not a reason to avoid the movie. The problems lie in the way the absurdity is presented and the manner in which the screenplay resolves once the "truth" is revealed. Alfred Hitchcock rarely me...

Until Dawn is a gimmick movie – a production with just enough tantalizing moments to assemble an intriguing 3-minute trailer but not nearly enough to comprise a full-length feature. It’s technically based on a video game, although the connecti...

Now that Kevin Costner has grown too old to convincingly play a baseball star (even an aging Major Leaguer, as in For Love of the Game), he has progressed logically. In The Upside of Anger, he portrays an ex-Detroit Tiger whose life has deteriorat...

Is it unfair to compare Luc Besson to Michael Bay? Some would argue that it is but I’m not sure Besson would be among them. Both directors make the movies they want to make and, although there’s more artistry evident in Besson’s work, th...

Going into this film, I wondered whether the filmmakers would succeed at generating tension out of an event whose outcome is so well-known. Even those with only a rudimentary knowledge of history are aware that Hitler did not die as the result of ...