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Time travel movies meddle with paradoxes and causality - these things lie at the core of their essential fascination. The difference between a good time travel movie and a bad one often rests with one simple quality: Having established a set of "...

Watching The Prestige is like observing a magic act where the magician's sleight-of-hand isn't deft enough. The trick almost works, but not quite… With its mechanical twists and turns and lack of heart, the movie often resembles Sleuth in superf...

Pretty Persuasion opens with more promise than it closes with. It doesn't take long for the cattily satirical tone to become monotonous as the characters refuse all attempts at development and the plot treads water into the shallows. The film tri...

A Price Above Rubies is writer/director Boaz Yakin's follow-up to his highly-regarded, tautly-paced 1994 picture, Fresh. Sadly, little of the energy and intelligence of the earlier film is evident in this, an overwrought melodrama populated ...

Pride is one of those generic inspirational sports movies that has been cobbled together from spare parts left to rust on Hollywood's shelf of clichés and stereotypes. Take a little '70s racism, add the guidance of a strong coach, throw in minor ...

The generic cop movie has become such a tedious bore that when something like The Departed comes along, it injects energy into a genre that, over time, has lost momentum to a dried-up wellspring of creativity. Even as recently as the '80s, when Di...

Watching Pride & Prejudice and Zombies, I was overwhelmed with a desire to re-watch the definitive 1995 Pride and Prejudice mini-series starring Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle. That’s because this new horror/romance mashup provides just enou...

One of the most unfortunate aspects of a courtroom thriller is the tendency to degenerate into preposterous melodrama. It's as if the basic situation of having a person on trial for their life isn't inherently powerful enough. As a result, cheap...

It would be possible to write pages and pages comparing and contrasting the reality of Bill Clinton's 1992 Presidential campaign with the fictional one of Jack Stanton, the candidate in Primary Colors. Likewise, it would be equally possible to dev...

Every horror fan deserves the occasional (decent) fix, and in the midst of one of the bleakest movie months of the year, Primate delivers. There’s nothing terribly original about Johannes Roberts’ rabid chimpanzee tale, but that’s kind o...