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The Cooler, as icy a title as you're likely to find, is about the efforts of one man to find his luck (or, to be more precise, some form of luck other than that of the bad variety). Rarely has a more pathetic individual been captured and portrayed ...

Creed II, the follow-up to 2015’s surprisingly successful Creed, runs afoul of a common problem to plague unplanned sequels: the need to match audience expectations trumps all other concerns, including creative latitude. The eighth installment...

Creed III is the first Rocky movie without Rocky. Considering the imbalance created by the Stallone/Jordan dynamic in Creed II, the decision to excise the Italian Stallion from the narrative framework makes sense. The Creed movies need to move forw...

Crossing Over is Wayne Kramer's Crash-inspired look at the world of immigration in Southern California. Like Paul Haggis' Oscar winning film, this one is replete with coincidences and contrivances but, unlike Crash, it also features too many insta...

Call it The Golden Compass rule: No multi-part movie series should be started without a reasonable certainty that the story will be told in full. And, although The Golden Compass’ planned sequels were the first recent films to fall afoul of t...

During the early part of his career, filmmaker Richard Linklater had a fondness for freeform films that were strong on setting and character interaction and light on narrative. His first three professional productions – his calling-card Slackers...

Is revenge a viable path to redemption? That's the question posed by Niels Arden Oplev's Dead Man Down, the Danish director's introduction to U.S.-funded productions. With a cast populated by serious actors (not necessarily A-list stars but men and...

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...

Wedding the phrase "Jerry Bruckheimer production" with the words "intelligent screenplay" might seem to be an unimaginable mismatch, but it has happened. Déjà Vu, the new thriller from Bruckheimer and director Tony Scott, impresses with both the...

While many movies claim to be based on true stories, Dreamer takes it one step further. The film's official name is Dreamer: Inspired by a True Story. The word "inspired" allows a lot of creative license. In fact, very little of what happens in ...