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Despite being afflicted with some common tropes of the horror genre, Sean Ellis’ The Cursed (which had the less generic title Eight for Silver when it premiered at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival) is imbued with its own brand of originality. Ell...

Renny Harlin, whose previous directorial efforts include Die Hard 2 and Cliffhanger, seems fond of big, explosive action pictures. Unfortunately, excepting his debut (the middle film in the Die Hard trilogy), plot coherency hasn't been a particula...

Romantic comedies are a dime-a-dozen, and most of them fail because they pursue slapstick while losing sight of the characters. Because The Cutting Edge doesn't fall into that trap, it results in an enjoyable lark. Despite a recycled plot, this a...

Generally speaking, the movie industry loves the concept of unrequited love…to a point. That point is, of course, that there’s a happy ending – a quality notably absent from Edmond Rostand’s play, Cyrano de Bergerac, upon which Joe Wright�...

Every summer it seems there's a pleasant surprise lurking in an unexpected place. This year, Cyrus is a candidate. The cast might lead one to believe this is a Judd Apatow movie; after all, three of the four principals (John C. Reilly, Jonah Hill...

Most of us have known someone like Dan Landsman (Jack Black): a Type A personality whose most salient trait is that he's unbearable to be around. Dictatorial and self-absorbed, he is obsessed with being the most important person in the room. Alth...

When it comes to a Spike Lee movie, it would be foolish to expect a politics-free zone. Lee is an activist filmmaker and has never pretended otherwise. He makes movies that entertain and educate but, most importantly, he seeks to challenge. So...

Perhaps a better title for The Da Vinci Code might be Much Ado about Nothing. When you boil away the hype and hysteria, all that remains is a pedestrian murder mystery that isn't sufficiently challenging or scandalous to raise anyone's hackles. I...

The similarities between Daddy’s Home 2 and last week’s release, A Bad Moms Christmas, are striking. Not only are the two films sequels to successful first installments but they follow the similar template of bringing back the most popular...

Dadetown is a "meta-documentary" about small-town America in the 1990s. Is a rural, close-knit community still the "American dream", or, with the closing of factories, has it become a kind of American nightmare? A stunning first feature from ...