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During the mid-1990s, in the wake of Quentin Tarantino’s unlikely ascent, the movie landscape was suddenly populated by all manner of Pulp Fiction wannabes. Some were better than others. Joe Carnahan got his start with one of these, 1998’s ...

Seemingly taking inspiration from Traffic, writer/director Nicholas Jarecki attempts to use a thematic connection (rather than a narrative one) to tie together three separate stories. (Although two of the segments intersect at the climax.) The...

Taking a page out of the Maleficent handbook, Disney has decided to take another of its iconic villains – in this case, Cruella DeVil – and provide her with an origin story that recasts her as a misunderstood victim rather than one of the ...

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...

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�...

While watching Dear Evan Hansen, I was reminded of the 1994 film I’ll Do Anything. Originally designed as a musical (with eight songs by Prince), the decision was made in the editing room to release the Nick Nolte vehicle as a straight drama...

When I finished watching Don’t Look Up, I couldn’t avoid asking the obvious question: How did this go so wrong? Despite a to-die-for cast and a seemingly can’t-miss premise, Don’t Look Up is a failure on too many levels and, although t...

There’s a lot to like about this new version of Dune: the screenplay’s ability to pare down Frank Herbert’s complex, weighty novel without emasculating it, the epic scope, and the spectacle of the experience. Director Denis Villeneuve’...

Louis Wain (Benedict Cumberbatch), a product of late 19th Century England, drew pictures of cats. All sorts of cats – big cats, small cats, wild cats, tame cats. Most were anthropomorphized, although some more than others. Wain’s cat drawi...

In recent years, the two animation studios working under the Disney umbrella have been making a concerted attempt to shake free of their reputation as a White Princess Factory. The result: a pipeline of features populated with diverse casts – Coc...