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Mira Nair's Amelia is a by-the-book bio-pic. By following the template, it's as safe and straightforward as one could possibly get, without narrative flourishes and with minimal exaggeration to satisfy Hollywood's appetite for fictionalization. Th...

There can be a lot of power in stories about addiction: the power to dishearten, the power to frustrate, and (on rare occasions) the power to uplift. Regardless of the substance at the core of the disease, movies about addiction follow a famil...

In a way, it’s surprising that it has taken this long for someone to make a female-oriented version of Greg Mottola’s 2007 high school comedy Superbad. Perhaps the best way to describe Booksmart, the assured directorial debut of actress O...

Is it too much to ask that a narrative film have a beginning, a middle, and an end? Apparently in the case of Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant, a loose adaptation of Darren Shan's Vampire Blood trilogy, the answer is "yes." Developed with...

It has been a long time since I came as close to walking out of a movie as I did with Confessions of a Shopaholic. Not only did I find this production to be irritating, unfunny, and lacking in entertainment value, but I found its underlying slavis...

Perhaps the most curious and counterproductive aspect of The Fifth Estate, the so-called "Wikileaks movie," is the decision by director Bill Condon and screenwriter Josh Singer to establish the film as a thriller. The material covered in the produc...

Glory is, without question, one of the best movies ever made about the American Civil War (a.k.a. "The War Between the States"). The reason isn't just the way in which Kevin Jarre's script illuminates a frequent oversight of history books, nor is ...

The Great Raid seeks to be the kind of epic war film that was popular during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. And, unlike many recent entries in the genre, it does not seek to take a revisionist look at war. The central premise is promising: a factua...

With Heaven and Earth, Oliver Stone has completed his so-called "Vietnam Trilogy" - three films that examine different aspects of the war that, to this point, has provided the centerpiece of Stone's filmmaking career. The story begins in the vi...

Hellboy is director Guillermo del Toro's second venture behind the cameras for a comic-book themed motion picture. However, although the hyper-stylized setting and kinetic action sequences share a kinship with those in Blade 2, Hellboy showcases a...