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Fame was released at the dawn of the 1980s – a high school/coming-of-age film arriving in the forefront of a genre that exploded during the decade. This was a pre-John Hughes movie and, as such, is barely recognizable as what the “teen movie�...

It's a tough thing for a dysfunctional-family-at-Christmas movie to avoid doses of melodrama, and it's fair to say that The Family Stone contains its share. But the nice thing about the movie is that it avoids overt manipulation. There's some - i...

On the surface, The Family appears to tell a familiar story: a mob enforcer turned informer is placed into the witness protection program while his former associates seek to find and terminate him. What differentiates this from its antecedents is t...

Fantastic Four is the comic book that gave birth to Marvel Comics, making it the older sibling to such better-known titles as Spider-Man, X-Men, and The Incredible Hulk. The reason Fantastic Four has been relegated to the role of "ugly stepsister"...

A loving ode to the Fantastic Four comic books of the 1960s and 1970s, Fantastic Four: First Steps is unlike any other MCU movie in two regards. First, its faithfulness to its source material can be found as much in its tone and style as in i...

With a title like Faster, it has to be a balls-to-the-walls action flick, right? Although that's how George Tillman Jr.'s feature is being marketed, that's not what it is. Faster is a revenge thriller that's more interested in delving into the da...

Calling The Fault in Our Stars a "teenage cancer romance" might be understating the film's laudable qualities but it's also a reasonably accurate three-word summary of the plot. Adapted from John Green's best-selling YA novel of the same name, The ...

With Ferrari, Michael Mann falls afoul of one of the pitfalls of the bio-pic: by focusing too tightly on one brief period in the main character’s life, he creates an “is that all there is?” feeling. Although the real Enzo Ferrari was a large...

From Rocky to Raging Bull, boxing movies with a variety of themes and intentions have been staples at Oscar time. On the one hand, there are the crowd-pleasing stories: tales of woebegone underdogs given a chance at redemption by going 15 rounds in...

At times, Finding Your Feet tries too hard to be crowd-pleasing. The romantic comedy from director Richard Longcraine offers all the highs and lows demanded by the genre. The “twist”, to the extent it can be named as such, is that the char...