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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...

As a satire about the absurdity of war and the way the news media covers it, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot has surprisingly dull fangs. Coming from Lorne Michaels and Tina Fey, this is especially surprising since neither is known for pulling punches. Neverth...

For our cinematic introduction to the year 2005, I can offer an alternative two-word title to the one selected by Universal Pictures: Utter Crap. (There are more colorful possibilities, but I like to think of this website as family-friendly.) At le...

I might have felt sad about what director Howard Deutch and screenwriter George Gallo have done to the characters from The Whole Nine Yards if I cared about them in the first place. The problem with a movie like Jonathan Lynn's 2000 noir comedy is...

I’m not going to lie. I laughed - just not as frequently or as hard as I would have liked to.  Why Him? contains its share of effective humor, both of the clever and raunchy kinds, but it also suffers from two malaises that infect many mod...

The filmmakers have decided to append the subtitle For Good onto this, the conclusion to their bifurcated adaptation of the insanely popular Broadway musical. An equally appropriate title might be Wicked: More of the Same, because that’s exactly...

Let me start out this review by asserting that those who consider themselves die-hard fans of the stage musical Wicked, upon which this movie is based, will almost certainly love what director Jon M. Chu (Crazy Rich Asians, In the Heights) has deli...

Winter Passing is a classic example of a pedestrian motion picture being lifted out of mediocrity by an arresting lead performance. Zooey Deschanel doesn't just elevate Winter Passing; she carries it. There are other things to be said in favor of...

Calling Witness a crime thriller is technically accurate, but it does this layered and dramatically compelling movie a disservice. In fact, Witness is much more than a thriller. It's a love story, a fish-out-of-water tale, and an examination of c...

All of the great Universal horror movies from the 1930s and 1940s have now been remade: Dracula, Frankenstein, The Mummy, and The Wolf Man. Over the years, there have been numerous cinematic encounters with lycanthropy, but The Wolf Man is to were...