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For a current-day viewer to contemplate how Around the World in 80 Days won the 1957 Best Picture Oscar (in addition to four other statuettes), either imagination or time-travel is required. (The latter being more appropriate for H.G. Wells th...

As Good as It Gets is a perfect Christmas release, not because the story takes place during the Yule season, but because many of the plot elements are straight out of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol. There's more than just a little Scrooge in M...

For Ask the Dust, director Robert Towne, adapting the novel by John Fante, has returned to the time and place of his greatest cinematic endeavor: Los Angeles in the 1930s. The setting, however, is the only similarity between Ask the Dust and China...

What is the world coming to when the film community is remaking John Carpenter movies? Admittedly, Assault on Precinct 13 isn't the best example of Carpenter's expert craftsmanship, but it was the picture that got him noticed, and that notice enab...

Atomic Blonde combines the storytelling intrigue of a LeCarre/Deighton Cold War spy novel with the in-your-face kinetic style of John Wick. The result, while at times a little too visually chaotic, is bracing. Headlined by a committed Charliz...

August Rush isn't just a bad movie - it's an aggressively bad movie. There are times when it tips the scales of absurdity and becomes almost comical. The film intends to be a modern day fable about fate and music and Dickensian characters but the...

August: Osage County is all about the acting. That makes sense because the storyline doesn't offer much that could be considered new or remarkable. It's as big a downer as the pills popped by matriarch Violet Weston (Meryl Streep) but the quality ...

Had Martin Scorsese made this film 25 years ago, it would have been greeted with a surge of curiosity. Howard Hughes, one of the richest eccentrics of the 20th century, was still fresh in the public's mind at that time. Now, more than a quarter c...

If the recent spate of bio-pics of musical stars imparts one lesson, it’s this: artists should be remembered for their work not for the Hollywood-ized retellings of their lives. Back to Black is the latest endeavor by the motion picture industry...