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When one considers their mostly-exemplary catalogue, Pixar Studios deserves the benefit of the doubt. So, when sitting down to watch Lightyear, I did my best to curb my cynical bent for something that, at least on the surface, has all the earmarks...

Lions for Lambs is one of those movies in which the principals talk a lot but don't say much. The film is built not upon characters and plot but upon ideas. That would be fine if the ideas were revolutionary or interesting, but they're fairly com...

Although Looking Glass doesn’t get Nicolas Cage back to where he was in Leaving Las Vegas, it’s leaps and bounds better than some of his recent fare. (Left Behind may be the low point but, considering how many for-hire jobs he has taken in...

Considering the success of Peter Jackson’s live-action The Lord of the Rings trilogy and, to a lesser extent, his Hobbit movies, it may be difficult to remember that, during the 1970s and 1980s, the medium used to bring Middle Earth to the masse...

I approached Love Hurts with modest expectations. The well-worn concept – that of a retired assassin forced back into action to save the woman he loves – feels like a high-floor/low-ceiling concept: the kind of thing that’s never going t...

Saturday Night Live movies generally come in two categories: inspired comedies and woefully inept, borderline-unwatchable dreck. Unsurprisingly, considering the difficulty (not to mention the wisdom) of transforming a five-minute sketch into a 90-...

Ah, the dinner party – that wonderful stand-by for so many European films. Over the course of my fifty-plus years on this planet, I have been to my fair share of these (usually tedious) soirees, and none have been anything like the ones pres...

If there’s a rule to be aware of when it comes to Sony’s so-called “Spider-Verse” movies, it’s this: If Spider-Man isn’t in it, it’s likely to disappoint. That applies to Venom, Venom: Let There Be Carnage, Morbius, and now Madame Web...

Maestro falls prey to the most common flaw of many bio-pics: trying to encapsulate too much material (over long span of time) into a 2-hour running time. The result is that some sequences seem rushed and compressed, character relations...