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Let me say up front that I have never been especially fond of Canadian geese. Sure, they're cute when they're young, but they are long past the adorable stage when they first take to the air. Now that I've made that admission, you might be surpri...

This is what happens when a successful indie documentary filmmaker gets sucked in by the Hollywood system. As one can guess from the number of writers involved in this project, Four Christmases is wildly uneven, veering from screwball comedy to wo...

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...

Almost every filmmaker in the history of cinema would be thrilled by the knowledge that a feature of his (or hers) is considered an undisputed classic - a benchmark by which other, similarly themed movies are judged. Director Martin Scorsese, cons...

Hope Springs has the unusual distinction of providing a sample of what an Ingmar Bergman movie might be like if made for mass American consumption. The production leavens the painful psychological introspection that defined the Swedish director's b...

It has been eight years since director Francis Lawrence released Mockingjay Part 2, the second half of the bifurcated film that wrapped up Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games trilogy. Although the fourth movie in that series was the weakest entry, Law...

Amy Schumer is a little like Woody Allen in one way – both actors use cinema as therapy, working through various personal neuroses in arguably the most public and visible manner possible. For Schumer, it’s about body image and personal emp...

This certainly isn't the first motion picture to focus on father/daughter bonding, nor will it be the last. But I'll Do Anything has the distinction of being enjoyable and entertaining, while bringing a new twist or two to an old subject. No...

In the Heat of the Night was the first film – and not the last – to capture the Academy’s attention with its clear-eyed but hopeful examination of race relations in the South during the 1960s. Based on John Ball’s 1965 novel of the sam...

In my review of Divergent, the opening installment of the four-movie series of which Insurgent is the second part, I wrote the following: "As an entry point into a new world, Divergent provides a worthwhile portal. This is the kind of reality an...