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The fairest way I can describe Coming 2 America is to say that it’s not as bad as I feared it might be. Damning with faint praise, indeed. My expectations were based on two factors: (1) the original movie, Coming to America, was an amusing-b...

Contraband is the kind of thriller that offers just enough in the way of effective elements to assemble a two-minute trailer. When it comes to a 110-minute feature, however, the sketchiness of the plotting and the director's lack of sure-handedness...

Perhaps the biggest surprise with Coriolanus is the non-involvement of Kenneth Branagh who, for the better part of the last 20 years, has been engaged in seemingly every screen adaptation of a Shakespeare play (an exaggeration, but still...). At th...

Crazy Heart is the country music version of The Wrestler: a grizzled veteran whose days in the spotlight are behind him struggles to keep going while seeing the world through a haze of regret and booze. The story is unremarkable; the alcoholic com...

Most films focusing on the racial division of South Africa are framed around a mood of seething anger and tension. The inequities of the recently-abolished apartheid system have provided fuel for a series of motion pictures steeped in bitterness a...

There was a time when the western was one of Hollywood's most popular genres. Whether it was Gary Cooper standing tall in High Noon, Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas taking out the Clantons in Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, John Wayne fighting the Apa...

In July 1967, civil unrest resulting from the brutality of the predominantly white Detroit police department reached a boiling point. The result, which history has named the “12th Street Riot”, was one of the deadliest and destructive riots in...

Released in 1971, Diamonds Are Forever was Sean Connery's final "official" turn as James Bond (although he eventually starred in Never Say Never Again, 1983's Thunderball remake). After skipping On Her Majesty's Secret Service, Connery was lure...

Recently, Barry Levinson's career has been on the skids. After two critical and popular disasters (the overblown, overbudgeted Toys and the lackluster Jimmy Hollywood), the director is in need of a success. With this adaptation of Michael Crichton...