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12 Strong represents a recent war as depicted on screen in an old-fashioned way. Back in the 1950s and 1960s, war movies followed an established template that pitted the “good guys” (often Americans) against the “bad guys.” Such fi...

12 Years a Slave, sure to be a heavy hitter when the 2014 Oscar nominations are announced, is a powerful and compelling adaptation of Solomon Northup's autobiographical account of the dozen years he spent as a slave on Louisiana plantations from 18...

Danny Boyle doesn't believe in doing the same thing twice. After the rousing success of the romantic fantasy Slumdog Millionaire, he has switched not only gears but continents to tell the true story of Aron Ralston in 127 Hours, an "action film wit...

21 is a perfect example of how something that's "based" on a true story can nevertheless exist mainly in the realm of fiction. While it's true that the source material for the movie, Ben Mezrich's Bringing Down the House relates events that actuall...

6 Below is the second stranded-on-a-mountain yarn we have gotten in two weeks and, although this one is based on a true story, that doesn’t make it any better than the fictional The Mountain Between Us. In fact, without the considerable tal...

Adrift, like many competently-crafted survival films, chronicles the ultimate underdog bout: Human against Nature, where the odds are stacked against the former by the sheer power of the latter. Most survival tales come with a “based on a tr...

Had The Adventures of Tintin been a live motion picture rather than a motion capture-driven animated endeavor, it would have been compared to Raiders of the Lost Ark and Pirates of the Caribbean. As it is, however, with the cartoonish characters se...

The Affair is a tale of thwarted romance that spans decades. It aims to be an epic saga illustrating how war, governmental policy, cultural shifts, and geography place invisible barriers that keep two lovers apart for a generation during the m...

In Ridley Scott’s All the Money in the World, Christopher Plummer’s performance is by far the best thing and the scenes in which he appears are the most compelling. The irony of those statements is evident since Plummer wasn’t in the ori...

With its frequent jumping around in time, All the Old Knives runs the risk of losing the viewer somewhere in the space-time continuum. Movies like this, which demand a non-linear approach for maximum impact, risk diluting the characters, which adm...