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What were they thinking?To anyone who was a fan of the original 1970s run of the comic book (written by Steve Gerber and drawn primarily by Gene Colan), it seemed unlikely that a live-action film could recapture the absurd zaniness that the creato...

War is hell. It's a cliché, but not one that Hollywood often embraces. There are exceptions, of course, like Oliver Stone's Platoon, which takes no prisoners in depicting war as the gruesome, dehumanizing business it is. But Platoon and other f...

It would be interesting to know what contribution (if any) credited screenwriter Alexander Payne (Election, Sideways) made to the final draft of I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry. Except for the cloying, strident preachiness of the third act, th...

I Wanna Dance with Somebody (full title: Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance with Somebody) is as generic a musical bio-pic as one is likely to find. A by-the-numbers, slightly fictionalized chronicle of the rise and fall of pop singer Whitney Houston (...

Rarely is New York merely a setting in a movie. Whether big, bright, and garish or dark and dingy, the city more often serves as a background character. And, although the New York of a Woody Allen film couldn’t be more different than the one...

Fourteen years after the release of The Bourne Identity, the Bourne movies have deviated so drastically from Robert Ludlum’s source novels that, like James Bond, the film character exists separately from his written inspiration. Over the course...

Barry Levinson had an idea, and a pretty good one at that: take an actor, have him assume the role of a vigilante, and, as public adulation of his assumed personae escalates, blur the line between being a vigilante and acting the part. Unfortunat...

One of the cardinal rules when making a motion picture about a superhero, especially one no one has heard of, is not to make the integrity of the story depend on the existence of a sequel. Unfortunately, that's a rule that director Doug Liman brea...