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It takes about ten seconds to identify Asteroid City as a “Wes Anderson movie” and that’s arguably the movie’s Achilles Heel. Anderson’s style and approach have become so baked-into his projects that they threaten to overwhelm the materi...

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...

In a bygone era, something like Bandit would have been a TV movie of the week. All these years later, it retains the look and feel of something not quite “theatrical” in its ambitions. If it has any future as a streaming rental, such hopes lik...

Let me start with a disclosure: I have not read the Alex Garland novel upon which The Beach is based, so I'm not in a position to discuss firsthand whether or not it butchers its source text (according to some reports, it does). The film represen...

Beastly is Beauty and the Beast for the Twilight generation. Featuring a cast top-heavy with TV actors and a screenplay that could have been given an assist by Stephanie Meyer, the end result would have ended up on the ABC Family Channel if it had ...

The Beat that My Heart Skipped is director Jacques Audiard's re-imagination of James Toback's Fingers. Although Audiard and his co-writer, Tonino Benacquista, have retained the premise and some of the ideas of the original, this is, for the most par...

Tim Burton's name is on the credits but Big Eyes doesn't feel at all like the visually eccentric, gothic-tinged productions we normally expect from the offbeat director. Oh, there are some "Burton-esque" moments, like a vacation in ...

Birdman (subtitled Or the Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) is an ensemble film about theater life that occasionally takes time away from its dramatic/comedic narrative to skewer the pop culture sensibilities that have given rise to the so-called "mo...

If nothing else, The Black Cauldron has become the most infamous of all of Disney's animated motion pictures. When it was first released in the summer of 1985, it was to have re- invigorated Disney' moribund animated division, which had produce...

A mysterious, gun-toting stranger wanders the woods. Three twenty-somethings head out for some time away from society, looking forward to a vacation of camping and riding the rapids. Of course, their paths are going to cross. Of course, there ...