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Hollywood has a long albeit checkered history of mismatched buddy cop films. I don't know when the trend started, but it was elevated in popularity by the partnership of Eddie Murphy and Nick Nolte in 48 Hours. 23 years later, director Les Mayfie...

Mayhem, a bloody exploitation satire, is a little like The Purge in an office building. Although designed in part as a skewering of intra-office politics and the unpleasantness of climbing the corporate ladder, the movie quickly devolves into ...

When The Meg was released in 2018, it did strong enough international business to warrant a sequel. Although not entering blockbuster territory, it crossed the $100M mark in both the United States and China, reassuring producers that the multinati...

In a way, I feel like the victim of a bait-and-switch scheme.  The movie I saw isn’t the one advertised in the trailers. As marketed, The Meg looks like a breezy, campy monster movie that supersizes Jaws with an infusion of Jurassic Park. I...

On those rare occasions when a great motion picture reaches multiplexes, the film critic must add another aspect to his or her job description: that of cheerleader. It is incumbent upon those of us who routinely dissect movies to applaud the arriv...

Missing is the stand-alone “sequel” to 2018’s Searching, the mystery/thriller that presented the story via computer screen captures. Although only tangentially related to Searching and featuring a completely new cast, Missing uses much the s...

Moneyball illustrates what can happen when a non-fiction book that's more about ideas and processes is translated into a feature film. There's a lot of fascinating information in Moneyball (although, to be fair, it's questionable how much interest...

An understanding of how society uses - and, more importantly, misuses - the term "monster" offers crucial insight into the intentions of first time filmmaker Patty Jenkins. Without offering justifications or excuses, Jenkins seeks to provide some ...

Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge is a rigorously accurate historical account of events that occurred during the period between 1899 and 1900 in Paris' infamous Moulin Rouge nightclub. Luhrmann's meticulously researched motion picture uncovers several s...

For whatever reason, the character of Mr. Bean has never caught on in the United States. Rowan Atkinson's most popular creation has a small following in this country, but labeling him as an "acquired taste" would be an accurate descriptor. Unfort...