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When I first heard about The Counselor, it became one of my most anticipated titles of 2013. The talent alone made it seem like a "can't miss" proposition: Ridley Scott directing; Cormac McCarthy, the man responsible for the source material of No C...

Countdown to Zero feels just like a History Channel documentary, which is unsurprising when one considers that the movie was produced by none other than The History Channel. As with most of their fare, this one mixes archived footage with talking ...

If one was to judge Country Strong based solely on its misleading trailer, one might assume this to be a cliché-riddled Crazy Heart wannabe. And, although I will not argue that the whole cloth from which the story has been cut contains its fair sh...

At the very least, it's necessary to respect what the filmmakers try to do with Couples Retreat, even if the end result isn't fully successful or satisfying. Their goal is to take the basic template for a raunchy sex comedy and change it up by ins...

It's often said that if you're going to borrow, borrow from the best. And, in motion pictures, one of the best is certainly Akira Kurosawa. His The Seven Samurai was remade as John Sturges' immensely popular The Magnificent Seven. His The Hidden...

Cowboys & Aliens is a mashup of a mediocre Western and a mediocre science fiction story. The resulting film is far better than the sum of its two seemingly disparate parts. Although a little overlong, the production will find favor not only with l...

Uh-oh, this doesn't look promising. Oh, wait a minute, the movie hasn't even started yet. As absurd as it might sound, there's a strange synergy between very bad movies and very good ones. That's because films on either extreme of the quality ...

There's not much of a mystery about what Crank delivers. As promised, it's 85 minutes of action, with little in the way of encumbrances like dialogue and exposition, and only skeletal fragments of a narrative to keep things moving. For the most p...

Crank 2: High Voltage is the freak show act at a carnival. It's so over-the-top that the phrase ceases to have meaning in this context. It's a bizarre concoction of testosterone, adrenaline, and psychedelics. It seeks not only to top its predece...

Ensemble features can be daunting, yet some filmmakers embrace the challenge, and their results reward an audience. A lot of characters are woven into the tapestry of Crash, the feature directing debut of TV veteran Paul Haggis. (Haggis was also O...