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Welcome to cyberspace, the newest locale for the action-adventure film. Borrowing heavily from Alfred Hitchcock and John Grisham, director Irwin Winkler reduces a potentially-fascinating premise to the spearhead of a routine thriller. The Net sta...

Spoiler Alert: To the extent that the term "spoiler" can be applied to something this formulaic, I suppose I ought to warn readers that I talk in general terms about how the movie ends. What do you get when you mix A Christmas Carol with a subst...

For those familiar with director Shane Black’s oeuvre, The Nice Guys is closer to Kiss Kiss Bang Bang than Iron Man 3. Featuring the same blend of high octane action and Tarantino-esque humor as Black’s 2005 debut, The Nice Guys doubles as a come...

The best thing that can be said about the second Night at the Museum (which bears the unnecessarily long full title of Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian) is that it's harmless. And pointless. And dumb. This is a perfect example of a ...

Guillermo del Toro has taken us down some dark paths before, but this is the deepest and darkest he has gone, adapting the 1946 novel of the same name by William Lindsay Gresham (which was previously made into a movie in 1947). Set during the Grea...

I can kind-of, sort-of see how this story might work as a novel. Bad dialogue doesn't sound as howlingly awful when not spoken aloud. Idiotic plot contrivances don't seem as painful and obvious. A love affair depends only on the spell woven by t...

The Ninth Gate has two modes: tedious and moronic, with the two not being mutually exclusive. Then, one-hundred minutes into this seemingly interminable movie (which clocks in at about 2:10), things take a turn for the worse and The Ninth Gate spi...

It's always a tricky proposition to make a motion picture based on recent history -- and the more public the episode, the more difficult it is for the film maker to balance drama with accuracy. This is especially true when that film maker is Olive...

It's increasingly unusual that a thriller can claim to maintain its intensity for the entirety of its running length. No Escape is masterful at keeping the stakes high without confounding our so-called "suspension of disbelief." Unlike ...

No Hard Feelings is an odd movie in that films of this sort have fallen out of vogue in the 21st century and are rarely accorded any sort of theatrical release. (The box office results will determine whether the decision to reject a direct-to-stre...