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The fairest way I can describe Coming 2 America is to say that it’s not as bad as I feared it might be. Damning with faint praise, indeed. My expectations were based on two factors: (1) the original movie, Coming to America, was an amusing-b...

It started ten years ago in 2008. Call it the “Liam Neeson Action Hero First Quarter Movie.” With Taken, Pierre Morel and Luc Besson tried an experiment: put a suave, respected actor in a B-grade action movie and see how audiences reacted....

There’s real-world AI and there’s movie-world AI. The nexus between the two is small but that hasn’t stopped motion pictures from dabbling with science fiction stories that are still more “fiction” than “science.” With these movies e...

If one was going to cite a movie title for truth in advertising, it might be James Mangold’s Bob Dylan bio-pic, A Complete Unknown because, at the end of the proceedings, it’s an apt description of the main character. The reason it clear: Mang...

Most of the time, I am irritated when a movie proclaims to be "based on a true story." In many cases, it's a gratuitous marketing ploy. For Compliance, however, it's useful information. Unlike many "based on true stories," this one closely follows ...

Con Air, producer Jerry Bruckheimer's generic follow-up to 1996's blockbuster, The Rock, is the kind of motion picture that critics refer to when they moan about the "dumbing down" of American cinema. This movie is a perfect example of what's wron...

The popularity of Conan the Barbarian peaked during the early 1980s, with no fewer than three monthly comic books to go along with the books and the first Arnold Schwarzenegger movie. The success of the 1982 film begot a horrible sequel, Conan the...

Know, O Prince, that between the years when the oceans drank Atlantis and the gleaming cities, and the years of the rise of the sons of Aryas, there was an age undreamed of... Hither came Conan the Cimmerian, black-haired, sullen eyed, sword in han...

Regarding a concussion as a serious brain injury is a relatively recent phenomenon. For many years, “getting your bell rung” (as the expression goes) was something people were expected to shrug off. For sports, the fix was to take a coupl...

The Condemned is the latest action film from director Scott Wiper. It is also a noun describing those poor viewers who end up stuck in a theater showing this film. In principle, I'm all for balls-to-the-wall action films that serve up a fifth of ...