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Despite a terrific performance by Kate Winslet and some powerful moments during the film’s final third, Lee falls into the bio-pic trap of trying to encapsulate too much of a famous person’s life into a two-hour chunk. A chronology of the life...

There's no "rule" determining that religion-oriented movies are necessarily poorly made. Indeed, there are examples aplenty of serious minded, reverent motion pictures that work not only for pious viewers but for those with a secular outlook. The ...

For writer/director Brian Helgeland (Payback), Legend represents a visit to Scorsese territory; sadly, the result falls far short of the visceral experiences we typically are accorded by the legendary Oscar winner. Granted, it’s a tall order to...

Some sequels are made too soon, while others are made too late. The Legend of Zorro, Martin Campbell's follow-up to his well-received 1998 feature, The Mask of Zorro, falls into the latter category. It's difficult to say whether the film would ha...

Legends of the Fall is the sort of epic melodrama that only Hollywood can do this well. It's a spectacle more than a show, with soaring moments of triumph and tragedy. Words like "restraint" and "subtle" are meaningless in this context. The late...

It’s taken two spin-offs to transform one of the most surprisingly delightful animated franchises in recent years into an obvious toy commercial. When The LEGO Movie debuted three years ago, it was hailed for being more than what many people...

Let Me In is the English-language remake of the 2008 Swedish film Let the Right One In. From the beginning, there has been controversy associated with the "Hollywood-ization" of an edgy, ambiguous vampire tale because many die-hard adherents belie...

Note: There are minor spoilers throughout and final paragraph contains a somewhat more substantive, but oblique, spoiler. The "danger area" for the latter is marked. As Let the Right One In opens in a suburb of Stockholm during the 1980s, 12-ye...

While watching Liar Liar, it occurred to me that the chief problem with this film is that it has a script. If Jim Carrey had been unleashed without such silly, incidental constraints as plot and dialogue, who knows where things might have gone? A...

By 1989 and the release of Licence to Kill, James Bond had a lot of competition in the action genre. With so many higher-profile contenders (like Batman) in the arena, 007's popularity hit an all-time low. Audiences seemed less inclined to see th...