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Every year, there seems to be one film that kicks you in the stomach and leaves your head reeling. In 1999, it was Tim Roth's profoundly disturbing, unforgettable The War Zone. This year, it's Darren Aronofsky's Requiem for a Dream, one of the mos...

Rescue Dawn, which transpires in southeast Asia during 1965, makes three things perfectly clear. First, director Werner Herzog is obsessed with the story of Dieter Dengler. Second, Herzog loves making movies about men with a tenuous grasp on sanity...

It would be interesting to get a psychologist's perspective about why revenge/vigilante (two sides of the same coin) motion pictures are suddenly so popular. From The Brave One to Death Sentence to Before the Devil Knows You're Dead to Reservation ...

Reservoir Dogs grabs you by the throat and digs its claws in deep. From the moment that the unwitting viewer tumbles into the realm of Lawrence Tierney's gang of eight, they are hopelessly trapped there until the final credits roll. As the first ...

Respect uses vignettes to provide an overview of the early years of Aretha Franklin’s life and career. Along the way, the movie touches on a number of weighty issues including domestic abuse, alcoholism, and Civil Rights activism. The film c...

The most surprising thing about Restless, the latest film from indie director Gus Van Sant, is how conventional it is. Of course, this is not the first time Van Sant, whose penchant is for offbeat productions with little widespread appeal, has ente...

The most interesting aspect of Resurrection comes from guessing how insane the main character is and whether anything she’s seeing is real. Still, those are primarily intellectual curiosities and I’m not sure how well they gel in feature lengt...

When it comes to the annual Liam Neeson cash-grab, I have learned to temper my expectations. A guilty pleasure would seem to be an attainable goal, although those instances have been more the exception than the rule lately. The problem is that Nee...

Sometimes just having a clever idea isn’t enough. Not nearly enough. Take Return to Horror High. If I was being generous, I’d admit there’s something in the premise that could make for an entertaining horror-comedy/parody with a blurring of ...

The Revenant, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s follow-up to his Oscar-winning Birdman, plays like a cross between Terrence Malick and Sam Peckinpah. As unlikely as such a conflation might seem, the result works - sometimes to stunning effect. In a...