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Working at his current pace, Woody Allen delivers one film per year. Unfortunately, it has been decades since Allen's endeavors have been consistently good. In fact, even as far back as the 1990s, quality movies have been more the exception than th...

If your expectations for Magic Mike have been formed by the trailers and the TV ads, you can be forgiven for anticipating a male version of Showgirls or Coyote Ugly. Keep in mind, however, that the director is Steven Soderbergh, not Paul Verhoeven,...

It's easy to understand why the original Magic Mike was a success: the not-too-cheesy, not-too-serious story of a male stripper featured plenty of beefcake, high-energy dance sequences, standout performances from Channing Tatum and a manic Matthe...

Magic Mike’s Last Dance exemplifies Hollywood’s obsession with established properties. When Steven Soderbergh released Magic Mike in 2012, it was designed as a stand-alone film with a beginning, a middle, and an end. However, its box office suc...

The infamous background about the post-production woes of The Magnificent Ambersons is perhaps as interesting as the story told in the film. And, to add flavor to an already-spicy dish, movie critics and historians, in their zeal to lionize legendar...

Call it the law of diminishing results. Akira Kurosawa’s 1956 classic The Seven Samurai (the first time this story was made into a movie) is a great film - a contender for one of the best 100 motion pictures of all time. (It’s at #32 on m...

With Magnolia, director Paul Thomas Anderson has segued into the realm of the three hour movie. It's an ambitious step to take - making lengthy, ensemble movies with tangentially related and occasionally interconnected storylines can be a risky en...

Modern American society doesn’t value age. In ways that are sometimes subtle but often overt, we discriminate against those who have lived the longest and seen the most because they have lost prized traits: youth, vigor, and physical attract...

As a portrait of a romance in the throes of disintegration, Malcolm & Marie offers a balanced and heartbreaking examination of why it’s never easy to assign “fault” when love goes sour. Malcolm (John David Washington) is a narcissist who...

Maleficent might best be described as an alternate universe re-imagination of Sleeping Beauty. Taking a page from Wicked (the stage show that presents Oz from the witches' perspective), Linda Woolverton's screenplay presents an inverted version of ...