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The Producers is a movie based on a play based on a movie about a play. And that's probably the funniest thing about it. In 1968, Mel Brooks made his big-screen directorial and writing debut with The Producers, a slapstick farce about how two B...

It's easy enough to label Promised Land as the "anti-fracking movie" because, ultimately, that's what it becomes. Before the overtly political, sloppy ending, however, there are some interesting dynamics at play here about how corporations operate ...

Maybe it's my math/engineering background, but I found Proof to be fascinating both on the stage and on the screen. Actually, appreciation of the film demands little math knowledge (aside from recognizing that a "proof" is a logical set of equatio...

Every once in a while, someone gets the bright idea of making an apocalyptic horror film. The Omen series is probably the best-known example of this sub-genre, but it's not the only one. Now, The Prophecy, with its tale of warring angels and lost...

It is said that revenge is a dish best served cold. The Proposition illustrates that, extending the metaphor, revenge is more often bitter than sweet. Gritty to the point of being disturbing, The Proposition examines the revenge thriller not as t...

Halloween is rightfully considered to be the father of the modern slasher movie. Ultimately, all the Friday the 13ths, Nightmare on Elm Streets, and Screams owe their existence to that one low-budget film that crept its way across motion picture s...

It has become tiresome to travel to a multiplex seemingly every other Friday to see the latest remake of a foreign horror film. For the most part, the problem isn't that these productions are remakes but that they're bad remakes. In some cases, t...

Quartet is as safe, conventional, and uncontroversial a film as one could imagine. The straightforward screenplay is elevated considerably by a series of sterling performances. If one wanted to bolster an argument about the importance of acting t...

John Ford is widely regarded as the best director of Westerns, many of which featured his good friend and favorite actor, John Wayne, as the lead. During a career that spanned nearly six decades (from 1917 through 1966), Ford helmed more than 100 ...

My review of John Krasinski’s 2018 A Quiet Place called the movie “a superb exercise in understated terror that puts to shame ‘horror’ films that rely on jump scares and cheap theatrics.” It was one of the best films of the year and ...