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Since Liam Neeson began his action star career with Taken, most of his play-for-pay films have been depressingly generic. Although far from a revelation, In the Land of Saints and Sinners rises above many of those. Perhaps that’s because the...

The problem with An Inconvenient Truth isn't the message; it's the messenger. If the film's goal is to educate and warn about Global Warming, why use one of the most divisive political figures of the last decade as the spokesman? I don't have a p...

Sequels generally exist for one of two reasons: because there’s a creative, story-based purpose or because the earlier film made a ton of money. Like most of the Pixar sequels, Incredibles 2 has been brought to the screen because Disney saw ...

The Incredibles may become the first Disney/Pixar film not to dominate at the box office. That statement has nothing to do with the film's quality - in fact, The Incredibles is among the best of Pixar's digitally animated movies. However, it's go...

Raiders of the Lost Ark was a nearly perfect action movie – upon its release in the early 1980s, it redefined the genre for decades to come. It also provided a trap for co-creators Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, forcing them to repeatedly tr...

Roughly 20 minutes into Inheritance, I was hooked. Despite the overzealousness of director Vaughn Stein’s intercutting when attempting to ratchet up the suspense during an early sequence, the film exhibits a fast pace and the story offers an...

No American animated studio has been as successful developing films that work on multiple levels as Disney/Pixar. From the beginning, they have been interested in telling stories that equally engage children and adults. Consider Toy Story 3, for exam...

It has been four years since the events depicted in Michael Mann's The Insider occurred. Actually, to be precise, it has been four years since some of them occurred. In the interests of drama, a certain amount of "fictionalization" has taken plac...

There's something seductive about the idea of turning one's back on civilization and all its trappings. Many of us entertain this thought during a daydream or in those gentle minutes between wakefulness and sleep, but we don't view it as the act of...

With the election of Barack Obama, we have apparently entered a kinder, gentler world in which films about racial harmony and goodwill to all men are becoming commonplace (at least during awards season). How else to explain the presence of both Th...