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Nightcrawler is a dark and cynical movie for a nihilistic age. It's tense and at times uncomfortable, perhaps because the viewer recognizes that, although the story is fiction, there's a lot of truth in what it has to say about local news and the i...

When I was a child, one of the reasons I enjoyed the Christmas season so much was the annual arrival of those endlessly-repeated television specials: Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Santa Claus is Coming to Town, The Year Without a Santa Claus. ...

"Whatever you do, don't fall asleep." - Nancy The dream - or nightmare - is a staple of the modern horror movie. After all, even as manipulative as the device is, it's still a proven way to jolt an audience. Filmmaker Wes Craven understood th...

With remakes available for both Halloween and Friday the 13th, it was only a matter of time before the third member of the trio of '80s horror icons was provided with a new opportunity to greet a new generation. Welcome to 2010, Freddy Krueger. Y...

I can kind-of, sort-of see how this story might work as a novel. Bad dialogue doesn't sound as howlingly awful when not spoken aloud. Idiotic plot contrivances don't seem as painful and obvious. A love affair depends only on the spell woven by t...

Whenever a movie addresses the subject of a girl living alone on a desert island, the soft porn warning lights go on. So it may come as a bit of a surprise that Nim's Island is a family film in which no one considers skinny-dipping. What's more, i...

Nine represents director Rob Marshall's second big-screen musical spectacle. His previous effort, Chicago, won an Oscar; although Nine is likely to win its share of praise, it probably won't come close to achieving the same level of acclaim. Alth...

Edson Oda’s debut feature, Nine Days, is a pure allegory; the film works as an extended philosophical rumination but fails as a story. Although interesting in many aspects, Nine Days is as often frustrating as it is compelling, and the denou...

What's the point? If I wanted to spend 12 minutes watching someone pushing a cart around a grocery store, I'd go to the local A&P, not sit in a movie theater. At least then I could get the week's shopping done. Nine Lives is a failed experiment...

It's always a tricky proposition to make a motion picture based on recent history -- and the more public the episode, the more difficult it is for the film maker to balance drama with accuracy. This is especially true when that film maker is Olive...