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12 Strong represents a recent war as depicted on screen in an old-fashioned way. Back in the 1950s and 1960s, war movies followed an established template that pitted the “good guys” (often Americans) against the “bad guys.” Such fi...

211 (the name refers to the police code for a robbery) is a frustrating crime thriller that incorporates too many plot threads into the overall narrative at the expense of character identification, suspense, and emotional heft. Despite a high ...

You know a movie is doing something wrong when you find yourself counting to determine whether, in fact, there are seven guardians (as opposed to, for example, six or eight). 7 Guardians of the Tomb, a shameless rip-off of James Cameron’s Ali...

Adrift, like many competently-crafted survival films, chronicles the ultimate underdog bout: Human against Nature, where the odds are stacked against the former by the sheer power of the latter. Most survival tales come with a “based on a tr...

Spoiler Alert: This review contains spoilers related to something that happens about mid-way through the movie. Although I generally don’t like revealing plot points, it would be difficult to present a meaningful discussion of the movie with...

Science fiction means different things to different people. For some, it’s the quasi-fantasy/space opera of Star Wars. For others, it’s allegorical space-faring material like Star Trek. And for still others, it encompasses a strongly techni...

You don’t have to look too far or to deep to find the similarities among writer/director Andrew Niccol’s three science fiction films (I’m ignoring The Host, which is more Stephanie Meyer than Niccol). Like Gattaca and In Time, Anon boas...

Over the past couple of years, Marvel Studios has ridden the crest of an incredible wave, culminating in the 2018 one-two punch of Black Panther and Avengers: Infinity War. A drop-off was perhaps inevitable but I doubt anyone expected it to be ...

Aquaman is a reminder of the meager pleasures that can be gained from a generic superhero movie. Devoid of the complex plotting, comprehensive world-building, and narrative twists that defined Marvel’s two big 2018 superhero movies, Black Pa...

Arizona illustrates that, if a filmmaker intends to make a comedy-thriller, (s)he would be better served by emphasizing either the humor or the suspense, not trying to walk some invisible line down the middle. By choosing the latter option, f...