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The Producers is a movie based on a play based on a movie about a play. And that's probably the funniest thing about it. In 1968, Mel Brooks made his big-screen directorial and writing debut with The Producers, a slapstick farce about how two B...

Maybe it's my math/engineering background, but I found Proof to be fascinating both on the stage and on the screen. Actually, appreciation of the film demands little math knowledge (aside from recognizing that a "proof" is a logical set of equatio...

Quartet is as safe, conventional, and uncontroversial a film as one could imagine. The straightforward screenplay is elevated considerably by a series of sterling performances. If one wanted to bolster an argument about the importance of acting t...

Numerous movies about grief miss the mark by a wide margin, sliding down a slippery slope of schlocky melodrama with overacting performers failing to convince us that their tears are real. Every once in a while, however, a film gets it right. In ...

Ready Player One brings back a little of the Old Spielberg Magic. No, this isn’t on the level of a Close Encounters of the Third Kind, a Raiders of the Lost Ark, or an E.T. Instead, it’s akin to Jurassic Park: a special effects-laden actio...

Reckless is a Christmas story for all of us who like our holiday fare spiced with bizarre characters and strange plot twists. This black comedy, directed by Norman Rene (Longtime Companion, Prelude to a Kiss) and written by his frequent colla...

John Milius' 1984 action/adventure film, Red Dawn, has long faded from the memories of all but a small group of intense devotees. It is perhaps best remembered, to the extent that it's remembered at all, as the answer to a number of trivia question...

Memo to director Chris Columbus: In most cases, it's a bad idea for a movie to be a direct representation of a play. "Opening up" the setting is sometimes not all that's necessary to make a stage production into something cinematic. In a theater...

Richard III - it's Shakespeare that has nothing to do with Kenneth Branagh. Actually, at first glance, this film doesn't appear to have anything to do with the Bard's play, either. Opening in a 1930's England war room with a tank crashing through...

2014's iteration of Robocop is a kinder, gentler version of Paul Verhoeven's 1987 sci-fi orgy of violence. The storyline has been trimmed and reworked to allow it to slide under the PG-13 bar. That means a brutal torture/murder sequence is no more ...