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Hollywood loves adult entertainment, whether it's porn, stripping, or some combination of the two. The gold standard for movies of this sort remains Boogie Nights, and it seems unlikely this will change any time soon. The sad fact is that most porn...

Darren Aronofsky, who used the cheesiness of professional wrestling as the backdrop for a powerful, tragic character study, has moved behind the scenes of another kind of performance. One doesn't often think of ballet, with its graceful moves and u...

Three things occurred to me while watching Caught Stealing. First, it's the best work director Darren Aronofsky (Requiem for a Dream) has done since 2010’s Black Swan. Second, in addition to being set in the late 1990s, it embraces the indie film...

Is it too much to ask that a narrative film have a beginning, a middle, and an end? Apparently in the case of Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant, a loose adaptation of Darren Shan's Vampire Blood trilogy, the answer is "yes." Developed with...

The Fountain is Darren Aronofsky trying to be Stanley Kubrick. However, while Aronofsky is able to match Kubrick frame-by-frame for ending ambiguity, that's one of the few areas in which The Fountain keeps pace with 2001. Technically, this is an im...

Freakonomics is a most atypical documentary indeed. Comprised of a collection of shorts by noted filmmakers Morgan Spurlock (Super Size Me), Alex Gibney (Taxi to the Dark Side), Eugene Jarecki (Why We Fight), Seth Gordon (The King of Kong), and He...

While the makers of Gemini Man may have had aspirations for this to begin a new sci-fi action franchise, the would-be series doesn’t get off to the most inspiring of starts. At its best, the movie feels like a superhero/spy movie hybrid with...

At a guess, I'd say that Goosebumps will satisfy its core audience - fans of R.L. Stine's popular children's books - and bore pretty much everyone else. The film, which captures the feel if not the full charm of the written stories, comes...

There have been some great mistaken identity films over the years – The Life of Brian, The Big Lebowski, Being There, North by Northwest. From these titles, it’s clear that the concept is pregnant with possibilities and, in the hands of a c...

Jack the Giant Slayer is an enjoyable fantasy/adventure whose magic is partially undermined by marginal 3-D. Once again, the ugliest aspects of this format rear their heads: dim and fuzzy images, lackluster colors, and poor definition. Everything i...