Movies starring Max

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...

Upon viewing the completed version of this film, cartoonist Robert Crumb, whose story it tells, informed director Terry Zwigoff, "After I saw it I had to go for a walk in the woods, just to clear my head. I took my favorite hat off, this hat that ...

Not since Krzysztof Kieslowski's A Short Film About Killing has a motion picture about capital punishment been so disturbing and compelling. Dead Man Walking has appropriated a controversial subject by giving pain and personality to both sides of t...

Vampire. It is perhaps one of the few words capable of raising the hackles on the necks of both grownups and children alike. Tales of the un-dead date back centuries, but the most famous vampire of all was not born until the late 1800s (1897, to ...

From Russia with Love, along with its successor, Goldfinger, represents Bond at his best. Although the series has run for more than thirty years with seventeen "official" entries, it has yet to better, or even equal, what it achieved in 1963-19...

Nobel prize winning writer. Nazi sympathizer. Deep thinker. Naive fool. To some, Knut Hamsun was a hero, but to most, he was a villain and a coward who sold out to Hitler for the price of safety and respect. In Hamsun, a powerful 1996 feature ...

With the exception of one production aspect, On Her Majesty's Secret Service is by far the best entry of the long-running James Bond series. The film contains some of the most exhilarating action sequences ever to reach the screen, a touchin...

With 1964's Goldfinger, the third James Bond story to reach the screen, the "Bond formula" had reached maturity. Screenwriter Richard Maibaum, a participant in the scripting of the previous two movies, Dr. No and From Russia with Love, had id...

For many people, there is no hell more unimaginable than having a healthy, active mind trapped in a paralyzed husk of a body. Some of those in this situation seek a quick end to their misery (as was the case with Ramon Sampedro, whose tale was dra...

Whenever a movie is released that seeks to tantalize the taste buds through the sheer force of its visual imagery, most critics feel duty-bound to advise potential viewers not to see the film on an empty stomach. That warning applies here, althoug...