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John Woo directing a revenge-themed thriller…what could be more perfect? After all, Woo is a living legend for his acclaimed action films, The Killer and Hard Boiled, even if his English-language movies haven’t been on quite the same level. St...

John Sayles has always made political films; they are his bread-and-butter. Yet none, not even Matewan or City of Hope, has been more openly partisan than Silver City, which rips into the anti-environmental policies of the current administration, ...

Somewhere in Simon Birch, buried not too deeply beneath the surface, lie the seeds of a moving story. Unfortunately, as told by Mark Steven Johnson, this loose adaptation of John Irving's "A Prayer for Owen Meany" is a relentlessly manipulativ...

There’s a trick to doing a psychological thriller right. Hitchcock understood it. So did Chabrol and the Coens. Paul Feig, however, needs to brush up a little more on his technique. Tone is one of the biggest problems with A Simple Favor, a...

When it comes to The Simpsons, longevity is an asset few can ignore. 18 years old and counting, the TV series has carved its niche into pop culture. Most of today's high school students hadn't been born when The Simpsons debuted as filler on Trac...

Sin City is the most visually inventive comic book adaptation to make its way to a movie screen. While other directors have attempted to remain faithful to the look and "feel" of their source material, Robert Rodriguez has taken things a step furt...

Warning: Spoilers! (Not that anyone will care.) When it comes to direct-to-video productions, no genre is a more prevalent participant than horror. If one considers how bad many of the theatrical releases of this sort are, it boggles th...

Over the years, viewers have developed certain expectations about stories set behind prison bars. Those tropes, developed and exploited by the likes of the critically acclaimed TV series “Oz” and the less serious “Orange Is the New Black,”...

Sing Street is John Carney’ Valentine to the people and places of his youth and the varied and oft-maligned music that defined the 1980s. Carney infuses the familiar framework of the “coming of age” story with songs and whimsy and a touc...

On the surface, it's easy to assume that Sirens is a lighthearted erotic romp through the secluded wilds of Australia's Blue Mountains in the 1930s. Like in some modern-day garden of Eden, there are snakes, ripening fruit, and plenty of naked bodi...