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Some will argue that a film, being essentially a means of entertainment, can do little to change a national consciousness. Others, citing the power of the medium, will claim that motion pictures possess this rare and extraordinary ability. These ...

Part mystery investigation, part mismatched buddy film, and part condemnation of inhumane attitudes in 1950s Ireland and 1980s Washington, Philomena falls into the category of "too unbelievable to be fiction." Faithfully based on the true story tol...

The older he has gotten, the more offbeat his films have become. Now, to be clear, Wes Anderson has never been a conventional filmmaker. His movies have always appealed more to niche audiences than mainstream ones. (My favorite of his oeuvre, ...

Phone Booth became one of a number of post-9/11 films to fall victim to an increasing reluctance on the part of motion picture studios to release movies where on-screen events echo real-world tragedies. Joel Schumacher's thriller was originally se...

Pi, the letter, is a character in the Greek alphabet roughly equivalent to the English "p." Pi, the mathematical notation, is commonly used to represent the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. Pi, the movie, is Darren Aronofsky'...

For Malcolm Washington, The Piano Lesson was something of a family affair. For his directorial debut, the filmmaker recruited his brother, John David Washington, to play the lead, while his father, Denzel, produced. The screenplay, which Malcolm c...

"There are eight million stories in the naked city. This [is] one of them." That iconic closing line from the TV series Naked City is one of the things I thought of at the beginning of Nicolas Pesce’s Piercing, which shows an art deco versio...

It has been said that the only way to truly enjoy a stoner comedy is to smoke a joint before watching it. Considering the quality of some of the movies wedded to this genre, I'm tempted to believe that. Thankfully, Pineapple Express is an excepti...

I approached The Pink Panther 2 with the firm belief that, no matter how ill inspired it might be, it certainly couldn't be worse than its 2006 predecessor, which set a new low bar for all things Clouseau. In fulfilling those expectations, The Pin...

There are only two reasons to see The Pink Panther, and neither has anything to do with Steve Martin or his bastardization of Inspector Clouseau. The first is the opening credits cartoon - no matter how bad the movie, at least the title character,...