Movies starring Jeff Daniels

Warning: As with most retrospective reviews, this reveals key plot points. Spoilers abound.Undoubtedly, one of the reasons why James L. Brooks’ feature debut, the three-hankie weeper Terms of Endearment, won the Oscar for Best Picture is tha...

Allegiant exemplifies what happens when a book or movie exists solely for the purposes of placating fans and maintaining a revenue stream. Craft and originality are swapped out for familiarity and sameness. Plot turns into a regurgitation of not only...

When considering Steve Jobs, the first thing to recognize is that this isn’t a bio-pic. Oh, the movie uses Jobs’ life as the basis of its story and cherry-picks facts and reminiscences to form the skeleton. But screenwriter Aaron Sorkin a...

The Martian is the latest in a series of realistic science fiction films - movies that eschew the space opera elements of the genre and concentrate instead on believable aspects. Following in the wake of Christopher Nolan's Interstellar (and feat...

What propels filmmakers to make a sequel to a 20-year old film? Is it nostalgia for the brand of comedy that characterized the original? Is it desperation on everyone's part to revive flagging careers? Or is it Hollywood's acceptance that recogniz...

Looper is a tremendous motion picture experience. Not merely a "very good" one, but a great one. It delivers on all possible levels and its missteps are few and minor. It's a rousing science fiction/fantasy tale with a dose of hard-hitting drama, a...

The Answer Man is one of those modestly diverting motion pictures that's as sweet as cotton candy - and as insubstantial. "Forgettable" is the best term for something like this. It's not painful to sit through but it's unlikely anyone is going to...

It may be fair to consider Away We Go as Sam Mendes' penance for Revolutionary Road. The director's late-2008 Winslet/DiCaprio reunion was an immersion in bile - an acidic trip underneath the placid exterior of mid-20th century suburbia to a rot t...

The three screenwriters (Matthew Michael Carnahan, Tony Gilroy, Billy Ray) credited with adapting Paul Abbott's mini-series into a motion picture have done something remarkable: reduce five hours of material into less than two hours and still produ...

Gettysburg, Ronald F. Maxwell's re-telling of four hot days during the summer of 1863 (based on the Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara), is a spectacle that gathers power and momentum with every scene. Originally slat...