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For younger fans of Marvel movies, it may be hard to remember anything that came before the advent of the MCU. For decades, however, studios had been trying to strike gold with Marvel properties in ways to rival the success experienced by Warner B...

The scenario presented in Captive State would almost certainly have worked better in a mini-series format. The filmmakers’ low-budget approach of minimizing special effects might have allowed for an expansion of the narrative over a six or ei...

Three things occurred to me while watching Caught Stealing. First, it's the best work director Darren Aronofsky (Requiem for a Dream) has done since 2010’s Black Swan. Second, in addition to being set in the late 1990s, it embraces the indie film...

Con Air, producer Jerry Bruckheimer's generic follow-up to 1996's blockbuster, The Rock, is the kind of motion picture that critics refer to when they moan about the "dumbing down" of American cinema. This movie is a perfect example of what's wron...

For longtime fans of the X-Men comic books, “The Dark Phoenix Saga” has been the Holy Grail. As crafted by Chris Claremont and John Byrne (with an assist from Dave Cockrum), the epic narrative, which was a major element of The Uncanny X-Me...

Perhaps the first thing to note about the third Deadpool movie, appropriately titled Deadpool & Wolverine, is that it’s not so much a film as it is a 2-hour sketch comedy, an overlong parody that uses the MCU as a playground in which Ryan Re...

It has been one of the hottest tickets everywhere in North America where it has been shown. Now, placed in a limited number of U.S. theaters despite the near-solidarity of a chain multiplex ban, the movie is opening less than two weeks before Elec...

The Dig is the kind of low-key period piece that the Brits do so well. Based on actual events that occurred in pre-WW2 Suffolk, the movie explores the efforts of excavator Basil Brown (Ralph Fiennes) to uncover a sixth-century burial site. Of ...

The term “fan service” is often used in association with popular genre projects: Marvel films, Star Trek, Star Wars, and the like. The two Downton Abbey films (the first, released in 2019, and its sequel, A New Era) illustrate that even Ma...

Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale, like 2019’s Downton Abbey and its 2022 sequel Downton Abbey: A New Age, is comfort food for fans. And there are plenty of them: an estimated 120 million viewers worldwide regularly watched the TV series at its...