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For our cinematic introduction to the year 2005, I can offer an alternative two-word title to the one selected by Universal Pictures: Utter Crap. (There are more colorful possibilities, but I like to think of this website as family-friendly.) At le...

White Oleander is a flower - a hearty-but-poisonous flower whose beauty makes it appear deceptively fragile. This blossom, which appears several times throughout the film that takes its name, is a perfect metaphor for Ingrid Magnussen, the charact...

The Whole Nine Yards suffers from split personality syndrome - it's a strange hybrid of film noir and comedy. At first, this might not seem like an unusual approach, until you recall that most movies of this ilk are satires. That's not what's goi...

I might have felt sad about what director Howard Deutch and screenwriter George Gallo have done to the characters from The Whole Nine Yards if I cared about them in the first place. The problem with a movie like Jonathan Lynn's 2000 noir comedy is...

During the course of his short, stormy life, Depression era writer Robert E. Howard created more than two dozen pulp heroes, and wrote hundreds of short stories. His best-known creation, Conan the Barbarian, became so popular during the 1970s...

I’m not going to lie. I laughed - just not as frequently or as hard as I would have liked to.  Why Him? contains its share of effective humor, both of the clever and raunchy kinds, but it also suffers from two malaises that infect many mod...

The filmmakers have decided to append the subtitle For Good onto this, the conclusion to their bifurcated adaptation of the insanely popular Broadway musical. An equally appropriate title might be Wicked: More of the Same, because that’s exactly...

Let me start out this review by asserting that those who consider themselves die-hard fans of the stage musical Wicked, upon which this movie is based, will almost certainly love what director Jon M. Chu (Crazy Rich Asians, In the Heights) has deli...

When attempting what is often deemed the most unnecessary of cinematic projects, the remake, a filmmaker can adopt a nearly identical plot but still generate an inferior product. Such is the case with Neil LaBute and The Wicker Man. LaBute isn't ...

Harry Rawlings (Liam Neeson) is a career criminal – a thief so meticulous that he has operated for thirty years without being caught. He plans each job ahead, writing all the details in a notebook, and leaves nothing to chance. But fate catc...