Search for State

Dope, an unconventional coming-of-age story from writer/director Rick Famuyiwa (Our Family Wedding), posits the unlikely proposition of a straight-A student with nearly perfect SAT scores who builds a mini-drug empire as a stepping stone to get into ...

Spoilers! (Not sure if such a warning is needed – the movie is 75 years old.)In concert with 1941’s The Maltese Falcon, Double Indemnity was at the forefront of a stylistic innovation that would become known as “film noir.” Directors J...

Towards the end of Double Jeopardy, one individual threatens another, "I'm gonna have you arrested for stupidity." I wish someone had made a similar pronouncement to director Bruce Beresford and writers David Weisberg & Douglas Cook. In most case...

It's one of life's bitter ironies that one of the first things lost to moral certainty is the capacity for compassion. Righteousness is a cold, hard position, and an unshakeable one. It allows no room for one of the most basic tenants of human exi...

For a movie about small people, Downsizing certainly thinks big…too big, perhaps. Director/co-writer Alexander Payne has done such a good job of world-building that there are far too many ideas, subplots, and opportunities for one two-hour f...

The term “fan service” is often used in association with popular genre projects: Marvel films, Star Trek, Star Wars, and the like. The two Downton Abbey films (the first, released in 2019, and its sequel, A New Era) illustrate that even Ma...

Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale, like 2019’s Downton Abbey and its 2022 sequel Downton Abbey: A New Age, is comfort food for fans. And there are plenty of them: an estimated 120 million viewers worldwide regularly watched the TV series at its...

When I first heard that Twentieth Century Fox intended to re-make Dr. Dolittle with Eddie Murphy in the title role, I suspected that it was a bad move (the success of The Nutty Professor notwithstanding). Now that I have endured the 85 minute moti...

About the most positive comment I can offer about Dr. Dolittle 2 is that it's not as painful to endure as its 1998 predecessor, Dr. Dolittle. Unlike the earlier Eddie Murphy effort about the M.D. who can talk with animals, the second installment m...

Few will deny that Robert Altman is among the greatest working American directors. His best films - M*A*S*H, Nashville, The Player, and Short Cuts - occupy unassailable perches of artistic and creative achievement. With a filmmaker of Altman's ta...