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Never has the teen movie genre been more active than it is today. Seemingly every weekend, there's a new entry, and the solid box office performance assures that there will be many more to come. A trend with recent teen films has been to recycle ...

When I think of director Richard Donner, my mind gravitates toward titles like Superman and Lethal Weapon - high points in the filmmaker's career. Recently, however, Donner's output has been less impressive, and includes the bloated excess of Assa...

Time travel stories are tricky things. Although there's no hard-and-fast way to develop one, consistency is a key. As a screenwriter, when you're dealing with things like reworking history and spinning off alternate universes, it's necessary to sti...

Adrift, like many competently-crafted survival films, chronicles the ultimate underdog bout: Human against Nature, where the odds are stacked against the former by the sheer power of the latter. Most survival tales come with a “based on a tr...

Professional sports are a mixture of athletic achievements and multibillion-dollar business elements. When it comes to sports-based movies, the vast majority focus on the former, often paying lip-service (if that) to the latter. Air joins the like...

It opens with images of a late-night poker game: cards, chips, sweaty palms, concerned faces, and a woman's fingernails. Then, as night turns to day, the camera moves into the streets of New York, and, with the first bit of dialogue, we know we'v...

With American Pie, it's a case of the reality of the situation being dwarfed by the hype. Word of mouth has this pegged this as the most raunchy movie of the summer - a film that embraces taboos and pushes the limits of the MPAA's R rating (indeed...

It is well known that superlative film editing can save a mediocre motion picture. Sadly, the opposite can also be true. A case in point is Any Given Sunday, which, despite a potentially engaging story and a number of good performances, is at tim...

Arena is one of those movies where there’s a strong temptation to assign a one-star rating (or less). Indeed, based on “traditional” reviewing metrics, this 1989 sci-fi throwaway is undeserving of any degree of respect. The story is a hodgep...