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While it's true that making good romantic comedies is still something of an art, producing average films of the genre has become a science. Take a little chemistry, a portion of physics, some basic biology, and mix them together according to a wel...

Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon, which won the Golden Palm Award at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival, is the quintessential art film: slow, demanding, and rewarding for those willing to put forth the intellectual effort necessary to puzzle out its a...

During the course of his short, stormy life, Depression era writer Robert E. Howard created more than two dozen pulp heroes, and wrote hundreds of short stories. His best-known creation, Conan the Barbarian, became so popular during the 1970s...

Winter's Bone offers a case study in the essential philosophical differences between independent motion picture thrillers and Hollywood/mainstream ones. The third feature from director Debra Granik and winner of two awards at the 2010 Sundance Fil...

Back in mid-'90s, director Curtis Hanson was known as a B-list filmmaker - someone who could cull a fair amount of tension out of workmanlike stories such as The Hand That Rocks the Cradle and The River Wild. All of that changed in 1997, however, ...

There's no nudity whatsoever in James Cox's Wonderland, which is ironic, since it's about events from the life of the first big-time porn star, John Holmes (Val Kilmer). Unlike Boogie Nights, which was loosely based on the rise and fall of Holmes d...

If John Wick or Payback is a gourmet burger, A Working Man is a Big Mac. A little tacky and neither nutritious nor memorable, the fast food staple nevertheless satisfies a craving while offering a helping of ephemeral, guilty pleasure. This film d...

Ten years ago, when the second and final Timothy Dalton Bond movie, Licence to Kill, tanked at the box office, it looked like the venerable secret agent had finally run out of gas, driven into the ground by the likes of The Terminator and Rambo. A...

World War Z contains some impressive set pieces - sequences that, taken on their own, are either tense or visually arresting. As a whole, however, it's a letdown with a strange mixture of epic apocalyptic material and generic zombie stuff. The epis...

For Marvel Enterprises, the arrival of X-Men on the big screen represents the culmination of efforts that stretch back more than 20 years. For that long, Marvel has been trying to get one of their properties - Spiderman, The Fantastic Four, X-Men,...