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There's a longstanding movie riddle that asks the following question: Is it better to have a mediocre director and a great screenplay, or a great director and a mediocre screenplay? War of the Worlds, Steven Spielberg's entry into the 2005 summer...

If nothing else, WarGames is a great "time capsule" movie. Although many of the themes and concepts forming the foundation of John Badham's 1983 thriller are hopelessly out-of-date, this is one of the best films from its era to illustrate not only ...

Disaster movies have always been popular, but I’ll leave it to psychologists to determine the reason why viewers react positively to tales of mayhem and catastrophe. The making of a disaster movie offers its creators an unusual set of challenge...

As the end credits for The Way Way Back started to roll, I found myself wistfully wishing there could be a sequel to this movie. It's not because the narrative feels incomplete or because there are dangling plot threads. Instead, it's simply becaus...

I have never been a fan of big, bold tearjerkers – the kind that often function equally well as motion pictures or commercials for Kleenex. Despite great, lived-in performances from lead actors Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield, We Live in Time ...

Of all the cast members of the former Friends, Jennifer Aniston is by far the most successful. But there's no correlation between "success" and "quality." For a while, Aniston showed a willingness to try different things and experiment (her high po...

What might have been… Those four words tell the sad story of too many films, and Welcome to Mooseport is one of them. It starts out with a terrific premise, ripe with the potential for the kind of political satire we haven't seen on the big scr...

Considering the wealth of material provided by the recent tragedy in Bosnia, it's surprising that Michael Winterbottom's Welcome to Sarajevo is the first major Western motion picture to take place in the war-torn country. It's possible to argue th...

Those who were regular viewers of Veronica Mars recognize there's an immense wellspring of charisma available to Kristen Bell that she has thus far been unable to tap in her post-Mars career. When in Rome, despite being a standard-order romantic c...

When the Game Stands Tall is one of those cliché-riddled feel good movies that, by trying too hard to be inspirational, ends up as cloying and overly sentimental. At first glance, the narrative trajectory might seem to be on a different vector fr...