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This is the sort of movie that gives “chick flicks” a bad name. It’s a cross between inept melodrama and a bad sit-com. The “comedy” (for lack of a better word) is obvious, poorly timed, and not especially funny. The “drama” (again, f...

James Marsh's The Theory of Everything is an unremarkable bio-pic about a remarkable man. Its ordinariness is in large part compensated for by an extraordinary performance from lead actor Eddy Redmayne. Those looking for a chronology of the life of...

The best things about Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood are not elements that will build large audiences. This is a film about character development/disintegration and a comprehensive look at the early days of the oil industry. The more ...

The same questions accompany The Thing that accompany any revival of an '80s property, be it Conan the Barbarian, Fright Night, or Footloose (to name only a few of many, many candidates). First and foremost is "Why?" However, while it may seem unne...

When it was released in 1982, John Carpenter's remake of Howard Hawks' 1951 science fiction classic The Thing from Another World spurred much debate about not only which film was more effective but whether Carpenter's version fit better into the sc...

This Is Where I Leave You is a card-carrying member of the "family reunion" category of motion pictures wherein circumstances bring together characters whose once-close relationships have grown distant over the years. The mechanism by which this ha...

Those Who Wish Me Dead is the kind of straightforward thriller that was popular during the 1990s – the sort of thing that, had it come out 25 years ago, might have featured someone like Mel Gibson in the lead role. It’s a story of survival...

When viewing a melodrama like A Thousand Acres, it's easy to label it as a "chick flick" or a "tearjerker." However, such a facile categorization would do the movie a disservice, since it possesses a layer of depth that most films of this sort...

Courage Under Fire was the first American movie about the Gulf War. Since then, there haven't been many others. David O. Russell's Three Kings becomes one of only a few mainstream efforts to venture into this underpopulated cinematic territory. ...

I’m not sure whether I can argue that Three Thousand Years of Longing is among the best movies to be released during the so-called “post-pandemic” era (a time period that began in late May 2021) but it is one of the most singular, memorable ...