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Beginners comes as close to presenting a first person perspective as a movie can without employing distracting gimmicks. Told from the point-of-view of the protagonist, Oliver (Ewan McGregor), the narrative follows not only his activities in the pr...

If all that mattered in movie-making was that the end result was pretty to look at, I would be giving Brian De Palma's The Black Dahlia a rave review. There's no denying the film's visual virtues: the cinematography, the set design, the costumes, ...

Audiences today might be tempted to label Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up as a “thriller that doesn’t deliver.” There’s some validity to that charge – if what one expects from a murder mystery is a resolution to the whodunnit? asp...

Sure as the turning of the leaves, this time of the year, fresh with the scent of Oscars to come, brings the release of a new Woody Allen motion picture. Two years ago, his Fall contribution was Husbands and Wives. Last year, it was Manhattan Mur...

It's probably unfair to blame the failure of Carrie on Steven King. While it's true that the script, written by Lawrence D. Cohen and based on King's novel, is a mishmash of clichés and poorly-realized characters, director Brian De Palma des...

Cavalcade, which is based on the Noel Coward play of the same name, became the third anti-war movie in the Academy Awards' first six ceremonies to win the Best Picture Oscar. If nothing else, this reveals something about the lingering power of Wor...

Deconstructing: To write about or analyze in a way that questions traditional assumptions about certainty, identity, and truth, asserts that words can only refer to other words, and attempts to demonstrate how statements about any text subvert the...

At one time, a new Brian De Palma film was something to be greeted with enthusiasm. The filmmaker, with his affinity for borrowing from the greats (Hitchcock in particular), understood how to put his own, modern spin on classic tropes. His rep...

In the past decade, only two live-action, mainstream musical motion pictures have been released. While the first, Little Shop of Horrors, met with some success, the second, Newsies, was a box-office disaster. The poor performance of the Disney-ba...

For an action comedy, it's generally advisable that the movie be (a) exciting, (b) funny, or (c) both of the above. In the case of Hit & Run, the unfortunate choice is (d) none of the above. A slow, meandering misfire of a movie, this co-directoria...