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I guess seeing Robert De Niro in movies like this one is the price we pay for him once again working with Martin Scorsese. While the Scorsese films are unquestionably more creatively satisfying, they aren’t budgeted at a level designed to keep t...

If you’re more interested in visual razzamatazz than little things like character development or interaction, Ambulance may be your movie. If you prefer sweeping, hyperkinetic camera movements and spastic editing to a coherent narrative, Amb...

Years ago, while watching Delicatessen (in 1992) and The City of Lost Children (in 1995), I wondered which of the co-directors, Jean-Pierre Jeunet or Marc Caro, was more responsible for the films' quirky tone and striking visual style. Although Ca...

American Fiction is the best kind of satire – one that is full-throated in its message, which it delivers with a cutting edge, while simultaneously taking the time to develop the characters in a meaningful way. However, although the ending honor...

The Brady Bunch Movie, the natural culmination of a '90s revisionist Brady fad, is part homage and part parody. It takes the inimitable clan of eight and time-transports them, '70s attitudes and dress style intact, into 1995. Instead of being reg...

Be it ever so humble, there's no place like home - except when you can't figure out where "home" is. That uncertainty underlies the dynamics of Sarah Gavron's Brick Lane, an adaptation of the novel by Monica Ali. However, while the film tackles t...

Was it only six years ago that every Marvel movie was greeted with unbridled anticipation and around-the-clock showings that delivered box office records? Although Disney executives have been quick to blame the pandemic for the decline of the MCU,...

Despite being blessed with well-designed period sets and top-tier acting, this collaboration between Downton Abbey writer Julian Fellowes and director Michael Engler fails to take flight. I’m not one who normally issues demerits for a slow p...

On the surface, Clash of the Titans would seem to be mixed using a sure-fire recipe for success, so where did things go wrong? How did a film that should have captured the imagination of the young Star Wars generation end up failing? Some of it h...

The average American production about teachers and students invariably turns into an inspirational melodrama in which some great life lesson is imparted. All of these movies - from Dead Poets Society to Mr. Holland's Opus to Dangerous Minds to Fre...