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The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel is one of those pleasant, inoffensive British movies that offers a passably entertaining two hours without providing material that could be construed as edgy or stimulating. The problem may be that it's a little too p...

D.W. Griffith’s 1915 silent movie, The Birth of a Nation, remains one of the most controversial epics ever committed to film. The bold, innovative techniques employed by the director are offset by a repugnantly racist second half that depicts m...

Chernobyl Diaries is afflicted with a fatal flaw that damages many horror films: after a better-than-average setup and a promising first half, everything falls apart. The filmmakers spend so much time figuring out the hook and establishing the atmo...

Oliver Parker has made a career out of adapting Oscar Wilde, with versions of An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest already on video store shelves. For his latest, Parker has turned his attention to what may be Wilde's most famous no...

As bold and dazzling a spectacle as Evita is, it's missing a soul. This brash, glitzy, energetic entertainment has the power to hold an audience enraptured, but, at the same time, there's a sense that what we're experiencing is just candy for ...

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�...

Getaway is pretty much a 90-minute car chase. That's it. It may rival The Blues Brothers for the most vehicular wreckage in a motion picture. (Is that still the gold standard or has it been surpassed?) That said, however, consider how easy it is fo...

An Ideal Husband is a delightful parfait - an irresistible concoction of brilliant dialogue, sumptuous set design, top-notch acting, and a plot littered with Machiavellian twists. Possessing a light tone tinged with an acerbic accent, An Ideal Hus...

Romantic comedies don't get more generic than this one. Imagine Me & You (beware movies that borrow their titles from pop songs…) follows the established formula with only one Sapphic deviation - the romantic leads are both female. But, for all...

The chief pleasure to be found in any version of Oscar Wilde's play, The Importance of Being Earnest, is the dialogue, and Oliver Parker's re-interpretation is no different. All of the great lines are here: "The very essence of romance is uncertai...