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On the scale of dumb summer comedies, Safe Men ranks a lot closer to Mafia! than to There's Something about Mary. Oh, the film has its share of amusing moments, and a few of the roles have been filled through inspired casting, but there's still to...

Sahara takes the action/adventure story to new heights of preposterousness. In a way, that's not a bad thing, since it allows a certain level of guilty enjoyment. You're never expected to take anything in the movie seriously, because the characte...

There's something about an effective "man versus nature" film that gets the blood pumping. Maybe it's because the situation is often more dire than in a traditional thriller, or perhaps it’s the sheer implacability of the adversary, but the diffi...

The Santa Clause 2 is a worthy successor to the original 1994 film – that is to say, anyone under age 10 will be enchanted; anyone over age 10 will have trouble stifling their boredom. The movie has a laudable quality or two, but overestimating ...

You get what you expect with The Santa Clause 3. The two previous movies in the franchise have adequately prepared potential viewers for the experience of sitting through the third. The bland sameness of these films disallows the possibility of d...

This is what happens when someone takes what might have been a moderately-entertaining television Christmas special and tries to adapt it for the big screen. The Santa Clause isn't an unmitigated disaster, but it's also a whole lot less impres...

(Spoilers, but hey, it’s 40 years old!)Many movies look much different when watched years after their release but few have aged in quite the way that Saturday Night Fever has. When the movie first debuted in the winter of 1977, it rode the rising...

For an author of long-form fiction, the writing process isn't merely technical. As absurd as it might seem, the writer bonds with his or her characters to the point where they can become as "real" as any flesh-and-blood person. This is especially t...

Devastating. If, for some reason, I was asked to write a one-word review of Saving Private Ryan, that would be the term I would use. As was true of director Steven Spielberg's other masterpiece, Schindler's List, the impact of this motion pic...

Upon its initial release, Scarface was savaged by many critics and suffered from tepid box office performance. Opened at the height of Oscar season with awards aspirations, it was shut out by the Academy - although it did receive three Golden Glob...