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With a title seemingly designed to get the movie placement at the top of alphabetized lists, Aardvark is a hard-to-swallow drama about sibling rivalry, mental illness, and bad therapy. Cobbled together using clichés and contrivances, Brian Shoaf...

Body Heat is Lawrence Kasdan's directorial debut. His role behind the camera was earned in large part because of his writing contributions to The Empire Strikes Back and Raiders of the Lost Ark, two of the biggest movies of the early '80s. And, i...

Most of the time, I am irritated when a movie proclaims to be "based on a true story." In many cases, it's a gratuitous marketing ploy. For Compliance, however, it's useful information. Unlike many "based on true stories," this one closely follows ...

With 2003's Freaky Friday, Walt Disney Pictures is again cannibalizing its past. This is the third time the Magic Kingdom has turned out a version of Mary Rodgers' novel. The first instance, in 1976, starred Barbara Harris as the mother and Jodie...

From time-to-time, it can be refreshing to sit back and watch a tautly-made thriller where the characters (and their actions) are constrained by the laws of physics and tension is allowed to ebb and flow as circumstances warrant. If Quentin Ta...

Pacino meets De Niro. It has the sound of a classic screen moment. These actors - two of the best in the business for more than twenty-five years - have previously appeared in the same picture only once (The Godfather II), but, due to the split-t...

Here’s a link to my original review of Heat, published in December 1995.At the time of its 1995 release, Heat was heralded primarily as offering the first on-screen pairing of legends Al Pacino and Robert De Niro. Although the two had shared t...

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...

The smart romantic comedy occurs so infrequently that it has obtained an almost mythical status, sort of like Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy. In the subgenre of gay and lesbian romantic comedies, intelligence is even rarer. Since the ratio of goo...

When The Meg was released in 2018, it did strong enough international business to warrant a sequel. Although not entering blockbuster territory, it crossed the $100M mark in both the United States and China, reassuring producers that the multinati...