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The best things about Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood are not elements that will build large audiences. This is a film about character development/disintegration and a comprehensive look at the early days of the oil industry. The more ...

The Farrelly Brothers' first two films, Dumb and Dumber and Kingpin, were outrageous, uncouth, bawdy, and unapologetically lowbrow. Their third film, There's Something about Mary, is all of those things and one more: hilarious. I rarely chuckl...

You know what they say about "too much of a good thing?" That applies to They Will Kill You, the English-language debut of Russian filmmaker Kirill Sokolov, whose hyperkinetic approach to killing Satanic cultists is initially funny, bracing, and t...

A Thin Line Between Love and Hate is muddled to the point of tedium. The screenplay is credited to four writers, and its unevenness argues that none of them were on the same wavelength. Subplots start but never finish, characters come and go...

When it was released in 1982, John Carpenter's remake of Howard Hawks' 1951 science fiction classic The Thing from Another World spurred much debate about not only which film was more effective but whether Carpenter's version fit better into the sc...

The same questions accompany The Thing that accompany any revival of an '80s property, be it Conan the Barbarian, Fright Night, or Footloose (to name only a few of many, many candidates). First and foremost is "Why?" However, while it may seem unne...

Things We Lost in the Fire represents Danish-born Susanne Bier's first foray into studio-funded American cinema. The transition is seamless - Bier's signature style of simple shots and frequent close-ups remains intact and her choice of material f...

Sometimes, I wonder how the human races survives it. By "it," I am referring to that seemingly insurmountable time of life when body chemistry and societal pressures conspire to make every day seem like a titanic struggle - the teenage years. Eve...

For thirteen days in 1962, from October 16 through October 28, the world teetered on the brink of nuclear war as the United States and the Soviet Union stood toe-to-toe, neither bending, each waiting for the other to blink. Despite public assu...

This Boy's Life is based on the autobiographical book by Syracuse University professor Tobias Wolff. It tells of his early life in Salt Lake City, Seattle, and Concrete, Washington. Tobias (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his mother, Caroline (Ellen Barki...