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For all that the description implies, Elvis is well and truly a Baz Luhrmann film. At times frustrating and at times exuberant, the movie is ultimately effective in capturing both the triumph and tragedy of the title character’s life. It’s une...

Fans of George Miller’s Mad Max world, which has now reached its fifth installment, can relax: despite Max’s absence from Furiosa, the aesthetic hasn’t changed. The look, feel, and sound of Fury Road is evident throughout this spin-off/p...

The Gift, a psychological thriller from writer/director/actor Joel Edgerton, subverts the Fatal Attraction genre by sprinkling it with a little Usual Suspects flavoring. Clever and atmospheric, the film has enough twists to keep the average viewer gu...

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...

The Great Gatsby is widely recognized as one of the best American novels of the 20th century, although many remember it as a book we were forced to read in high school. Thus far, there have been several attempts to convert the book into a movie (mo...

The Great Raid seeks to be the kind of epic war film that was popular during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. And, unlike many recent entries in the genre, it does not seek to take a revisionist look at war. The central premise is promising: a factua...

As counter-intuitive as it might sound, chaos only works in a movie when it is carefully controlled and focused. Tarantino is one of several masters of this technique and there’s a sense during the course of Gringo that director Nash Edgerton...

Hacksaw Ridge embraces many of the clichés of the war movie but, instead of laying them out in a rote fashion, the film synthesizes them into a visceral, ultimately inspirational result. This is about heroism, patriotism, and an adherence to c...

In recent years, as cloning has become more readily accepted in popular and scientific circles, proposals (some more fantastical than others) have been suggested about how to return extinct species to the planet. Some, like using the DNA of a prese...

"From the producers of Underworld." Hmmm. Is that supposed to get me excited? Truth be told, such a tag line might be effective because, as pointless and shallow as the Underworld films are, they have a devoted following. Sadly, as apt as comparis...