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Despite his reputation as one of America's foremost "serious" filmmakers, Oliver Stone's name under the "director" caption does not guarantee a good movie. I learned that lesson while enduring the seemingly-endless tedium of The Doors, and was rem...

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...

Nostalgia can be a wonderful thing, especially when a director tweaks it and plays with it. With Nebraska, Alexander Payne, working from a screenplay credited to Bob Nelson, targets a very specific slice of Americana that has often been romanticize...

Okay, no one anticipated that Need for Speed, the motion picture interpretation of the popular (and addictive) series of video games, would resemble Shakespeare. There was, however, a reasonable expectation that some of the adrenaline would transfe...

Neighbors contains many of the qualities that make raunchy, profane comedies a popular commodity: sex, T&A, drugs, a barrage of four-letter words, and slapstick of the broadest kind. At first glance, one might be tempted to lump Neighbors into the ...

It’s the same sad story: a small movie becomes an unexpected success and, for purely financial reasons, a sequel is commissioned. The follow-up proves not only to be creatively bankrupt but a disappointment on all levels and thereby tarnishes t...

Nell, Jodie Foster's return to dramatic acting following a flirtation with Maverick's action-comedy, is an entirely human movie. In this lush, green world of rolling hills and crystal pools, technology is an unwelcome intruder; civilization, a thr...

Considering how ubiquitous social media has become in the early 21st century, it’s surprising how few films have used this cultural element as the foundation for a movie plot (rather than just window dressing). Nerve seeks to rectify this overs...

Welcome to cyberspace, the newest locale for the action-adventure film. Borrowing heavily from Alfred Hitchcock and John Grisham, director Irwin Winkler reduces a potentially-fascinating premise to the spearhead of a routine thriller. The Net sta...

In motion pictures, there are essentially three types of satire: a fatuous, silly kind that emphasizes jokes to the exclusion of all else; a lightly comic approach that gently pokes fun at issues while developing a plot and characters; and a vicio...