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Martha Marcy May Marlene is a quiet, non-judgmental character study that takes us into the mind and heart of a cult survivor. By flashing back and forth in time periods between the "present" and the "recent past," the film builds a picture of the t...

Martian Child wants to make us cry. It nearly made me gag. This is an exercise in shameless and inept emotional manipulation. The film doesn't try to hide what it's doing. If you don't cry, it hasn't worked. There's not a single genuine human e...

The Martian is the latest in a series of realistic science fiction films - movies that eschew the space opera elements of the genre and concentrate instead on believable aspects. Following in the wake of Christopher Nolan's Interstellar (and feat...

It’s a cliché to remark that “they don’t make them like they used to” but, in the case of Marty, it’s true. The simple, character-based romance is a thing of the past; even indie filmmakers rarely attempt it today. The first thing o...

There's a kind of exhaustion that sets in while watching Marty Supreme – a response to the relentless, anxiety-inducing noise that defines the 150-minute experience. In Josh Safdie's first solo directorial effort in more than 15 years (following...

The Marvels is so poorly conceived and ineptly executed that it not only makes this a front-runner for the dubious honor of worst movie of the MCU but a contender for the worst superhero movie of all time (although I’d argue that Catwoman retain...

When watching something like Mary, it’s useful to remember that actors, like all of us, have mouths to feed and bills to pay. That’s why an Oscar winner like Gary Oldman and a respected actress like Emily Mortimer can find themselves adrif...

At the end of the 1964 film Mary Poppins, the character of Bert (played by Dick Van Dyke) offers this final wish: “Goodbye, Mary Poppins, don't stay away too long.” Walt Disney Pictures hopes that 54 years – the longest span between a mot...

"In the last 20, 30 years, [Frankenstein has] been claimed by a whole generation of academics and scholars as a seminal piece of literature of that time. [It's] something which now, post-Freud, they feel reveals so many observations about family l...

Zorro, the swashbuckling hero of the undertrodden, was introduced to the world in 1919 when he debuted in the pages of Johnston McCulley's serialized novel, The Curse of Capistrano. Within a year, the masked man had appeared in a film, the silent ...