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The Spider-Man series, which debuted in 2002 and continued in 2004 and 2007, represents the first superhero cycle to complete a trilogy with the same primary cast and production team it had at the beginning. If nothing else, that assures viewers o...

The Spirit is an example of what can happen to a comic book-inspired movie when the sense of style becomes so pervasive that it overwhelms everything else, including an unremarkable superhero adventure. Unfortunately, the eye candy quickly grows st...

There was a time when it was considered "daring" or "risky" to make a comedy-tinged war movie. In the early 1950s, with the scabs from World War II still in evidence and the United States enmeshed in Korea, war didn't seem to be a lighthearte...

The three screenwriters (Matthew Michael Carnahan, Tony Gilroy, Billy Ray) credited with adapting Paul Abbott's mini-series into a motion picture have done something remarkable: reduce five hours of material into less than two hours and still produ...

1950 was a very good year for movies that took a look behind the showbiz scene. Both Sunset Blvd. (films) and All About Eve (theater) collected their share of Oscar nominations, with Eve beating out Sunset in the key Best Picture category. Howeve...

It’s in vogue to call some horror films “throwbacks,” but, at least in the case of Danny and Michael Philippou’s directorial debut, Talk to Me, it’s an accurate assessment. In recent years, the horror trend has been for “safer” movie...

Although Terminator: Dark Fate, the sixth film in the Terminator franchise, is an improvement over the other non-Cameron-directed sequels, it doesn’t rise to the level of the first two entries in the series. And, while Terminator die-hards a...

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...

“Raped While Dying”, “And Still No Arrests”, “How Come, Chief Willoughby?” The text of those three billboards establishes a narrative but, although that’s the starting point for Martin McDonagh’s stellar Three Billboards Outside...