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In my review of Divergent, the opening installment of the four-movie series of which Insurgent is the second part, I wrote the following: "As an entry point into a new world, Divergent provides a worthwhile portal. This is the kind of reality an...

Interview is a remake of the 2003 Theo Van Gogh film of the same name. Van Gogh, who was murdered in 2004 by a Muslim extremist, had planned to helm the English-language version himself. In his absence, Steve Buscemi stepped in. The finished prin...

Francis Ford Coppola's Dracula. Mike Nicols' Wolf. Kenneth Branagh's Frankenstein. Suddenly, horror of the old genre (as opposed to the '80s slasher flicks) is back with a vengeance. The latest, and arguably the most ambitious, to enter this p...

There's something seductive about the idea of turning one's back on civilization and all its trappings. Many of us entertain this thought during a daydream or in those gentle minutes between wakefulness and sleep, but we don't view it as the act of...

Into the Woods left me out in the cold. The long-gestating cinematic adaptation of Stephen Sondheim's fairy tale-infused Broadway musical, Into the Woods can claim a clever screenplay and a few enjoyable performances but little else. The generic ...

Based on the evidence at hand, it's impossible to say whether director Oliver Hirschbiegel's (Downfall) original cut of The Invasion would have been any good. What can be said is that the mismatched blending of Hirschbiegel's low-key horror and th...

With the election of Barack Obama, we have apparently entered a kinder, gentler world in which films about racial harmony and goodwill to all men are becoming commonplace (at least during awards season). How else to explain the presence of both Th...

Aside from the title, the basic concept, and the use of the surname “Griffin,” Leigh Whannell’s “reboot” of The Invisible Man bears little resemblance to the 1933 classic Universal monster movie and even less resemblance to the 1897 ...

Author Charles Dickens was enough of a celebrity to excite the interest of the gossip press of his day. Recognizing this, Dickens was careful to keep the nature of his relationship with young actress Ellen Ternan as far from the spotlight as possib...

With the freedom offered to him by Netflix, Martin Scorsese has crafted a narratively complex, visually arresting account of mob hitman Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro) and, in the process, reunited with some old friends and brought new ones to ...