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Over the past few years, as studios like Disney, Dreamworks, and Fox have worked to revive motion picture animation, Warner Brothers has remained mired in the lackluster morass that nearly killed animation during the '80s. The distributor's big ef...

With a running length of 30 or 40 minutes, Isle of Dogs might have been brilliant. Unfortunately, this concept, although suitable for a short, is too thin for a full animated feature. Wes Anderson’s sly humor, like the film, wears out its we...

What is it about clowns, anyway? Why do some people find them hilarious while others are creeped out by them? Whatever the case, author Stephen King exploited the duality of clowns – always smiling, seemingly-friendly, weirdly inhuman – in...

Frank Capra's It Happened One Night represents one of the great romantic comedy "templates." Although the film has officially been remade a handful of times (most not in English), its opposites-attract melding of screwball comedy and the road trip...

Every year around Christmas, there are two stories guaranteed to show up somewhere, sometime on television: A Christmas Carol (of which there are several good versions) and It's a Wonderful Life (of which there is only one). After its copyrig...

It's rare that a story set within the confines of a mental ward/hospital/asylum cannot be said to owe a debt to Milos Forman's One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest. It's Kind of a Funny Story is a case in point. Even though the basic narrative bears l...

It is sometimes said that there’s no such thing as “too much of a good thing.” In the case of Stephen King’s It, that may not be true. Clocking in at a bloated 170 minutes, It Chapter Two is a full 35 minutes longer than Chapter One an...

The 2003 version of The Italian Job is less of a straightforward remake of the 1969 picture than it is a complete re-interpretation. Enough has changed that it's possible to see the two films not as the same story separated by three decades, but a...

Jack Reacher has the distinction of being little more than it initially appears to be: a clumsily condensed mystery/thriller novel made into a movie that offers little more than every other clumsily condensed mystery/thriller novel made into a movi...

“I wouldn't bet the mortgage on there being a Jack Reacher 2.” - James Berardinelli, December 2012 Shows how much I know. Even though Tom Cruise’s tarnished star is burning up in the atmosphere and it would be an exaggeration...