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The enduring popularity of Daphne Du Maurier’s 1951 novel, My Cousin Rachel, relates to the ambiguity surrounding the title character. In his solid 2017 adaptation of the book, screenwriter/director Roger Michell (Notting Hill) has captured the...

Sometimes, pure technical accuracy isn't enough. Sometimes, artistry has to be taken into account. One such case in point is Barry Levision's The Natural, arguably the best baseball movie ever made. The film works not because it is flawless in i...

Expecting normalcy from a Coen Brothers production is a pointless endeavor, but anticipating brilliance isn't outlandish. Their latest feature, which has about zero box office potential, provides plenty of the latter and a little of the former. It�...

In Western culture, we are obsessed by the concept of celebrity. How else can one explain the plague of paparazzi that descends on public figures when they make appearances, or the popularity of gossip magazines and TV shows? Celebrities are l...

The November Man feels like just about every B-grade spy thriller that has ever been committed to the silver screen. With a slipshod narrative that could be mistaken for diluted Ludlum, Deighton, or Le Carre, The November Man provides us with an op...

O Brother, Where Art Thou? is essentially Homer's "The Odyssey" by way of the Coen Brothers with an assist from Preston Sturges (the title comes from the Sturges film, Sullivan's Travels). Or, to put it another way, it's a period piece road movie ...

If you want an insightful movie about the grieving process, check out Grace Is Gone, which explores how a suddenly single father must cope not only with the loss of his wife but must face telling his daughters that their mother is not coming home. ...

Jane Austen, considered by many literary critics to be among the first of the "modern" writers, is perhaps best known for creating believable, strong-willed, independent female characters in an era when women in books were often little more than wi...

Whodunits are rarely a good playground for Hollywood films. The average mystery, whether a stripped-down Agatha Christie-esque tale or a more complex endeavor, is too demanding for the structural constraints of a motion picture. As a result, when o...

Pulp (pulp) n. 1. A soft, moist, shapeless mass of matter. 2. A book containing lurid subject matter, and being characteristically printed on rough, unfinished paper. "The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the inequities of...