Movies starring Pat

The idea underlying Fast Food Nation is intriguing: take the premise of the best-selling non-fiction book by Eric Schlosser and convert it into the backstory of a fictional film. Where director Richard Linklater runs into trouble is in the executi...

February thrillers often get a bad rap, and deservedly so. Most of them are plodding retreads with little star power and less plot. So it's a surprise to see something as (relatively) well-crafted as Firewall showing up in theaters this month. Th...

I feel pretty safe saying The First Purge isn’t going to be a big hit with Donald Trump’s base. With a script that feels more like an anti-Administration screed than a fully fleshed out film, this movie is so overtly “progressive” as t...

When it comes to comedians, everyone has their favorite. Mine is John Cleese. In fact, he has held that place in my esteem since the first time I watched an episode of Fawlty Towers on PBS, some twenty years ago. Up to that point, I knew Cle...

Flags of Our Fathers is Clint Eastwood's homage to the honored dead of World War II as well as a meditation upon how an icon is formed. Based on the book by James Bradley and Ron Powers, the movie centers around the Battle of Iwo Jima, one of the ...

Different parts of the female anatomy fascinate various men. Some are drawn to legs, others to breasts, and others to hips. But Tony, one of the many characters to join the bizarre cross-country trek chronicled in Flirting with Disaster, is an ar...

When the characters in Footloose are dancing and the music is blaring, the film comes alive. It has energy and personality. Would that the same could be said about the dramatic scenes, which are hamstrung by a combination of mediocre acting and atr...

I suppose the best way to characterize The Forever Purge is as “red meat for Purge fans.” When you get this deep into a franchise, the tendency is to take the safe path and regurgitate earlier narrative beats, albeit with different “char...

The Founder, which chronicles the takeover and elevation of McDonald’s by Ray Kroc (Michael Keaton), works both as a character study and an examination of how ambition, even when harnessed for the “greater good”, can result in innoc...

The Fountain is Darren Aronofsky trying to be Stanley Kubrick. However, while Aronofsky is able to match Kubrick frame-by-frame for ending ambiguity, that's one of the few areas in which The Fountain keeps pace with 2001. Technically, this is an im...