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It's not often that, when the primary thread of a movie fails, the secondary storylines are compelling enough to make the overall experience a positive one. However, that occurs with Cold Mountain, a Civil War era romance where the love affair fiz...

The Cooler, as icy a title as you're likely to find, is about the efforts of one man to find his luck (or, to be more precise, some form of luck other than that of the bad variety). Rarely has a more pathetic individual been captured and portrayed ...

In the Pantheon of Marvel Comics superheroes, Daredevil is more of a demi-god than a full-blown deity. He's a notch below Spider-Man, The Fantastic Four, The Hulk, and The X-Men. 20th Century Fox has acknowledged this when determining Daredevil's...

Warning: Significant spoilers starting in Paragraph #4. (But, in a case like this, do plot details really matter?) Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier has gone from Dogma to Dogville. The director's latest, a three-hour political allegory, has fu...

Just when I thought it was safe to go back in theaters on Friday the 13th – with Jason having decided to postpone his duel with Robert Englund's nightmare-prowling pizza face until later in the summer – along comes a seemingly innocent movie th...

Elf is being hailed in some quarters as the next great Christmas classic. The people making such a pronouncement must have seen a different cut of the movie than the one shown to me. Elf is a feather-light motion picture that embraces the Christm...

Having to rely on a middle-man sucks, even for Death. The problem is, while He gets His due, someone else – usually a guy in a hockey mask or wearing Lee press-on steel nails – steals all the credit. And at least one intended victim always ge...

The more things change, the more they stay the same. As we enter the summer of 2003, Walt Disney Pictures reigns supreme as the distributor of the best animated fare. Yet, less than a dozen years after Beauty and the Beast became the first (and t...

Robert S. McNamara, the Secretary of Defense for John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, was an observer of and participant in many of the key events of the 20th century. History has not been more kind to him than his critics have been, so McNamar...

With 2003's Freaky Friday, Walt Disney Pictures is again cannibalizing its past. This is the third time the Magic Kingdom has turned out a version of Mary Rodgers' novel. The first instance, in 1976, starred Barbara Harris as the mother and Jodie...