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Hail, Caesar! won’t be remembered as one of the Coen Brothers’ masterpieces. An homage to Hollywood of the 1950s, this is more of a niche film than a mainstream offering. It’s an opportunity for Joel & Ethan Coen to use the era as a cinematic p...

For those who can't wait until June (and the arrival of Kenneth Branagh's Love's Labour's Lost) for their semi-regular cinematic Shakespeare fix, there's Michael Almereyda's Hamlet. Imagine the line "To be or not to be" delivered in the aisles of a...

Even in his early roles, like a supporting part in John Hughes' Sixteen Candles and the male lead in Rob Reiner's delightful The Sure Thing, there was something idiosyncratic about John Cusack's work. Recently, however, this quality has become mor...

In the tradition of Shattered Glass and Catch Me if You Can, The Hoax presents the anatomy of an audacious con artist and illustrates how the sin eventually catches up with the sinner. Due to an uneven tone, various unresolved plot threads, and a ...

Since stepping away from working with his brother Joel, Ethan Coen has found a new creative partner in his wife, Trisha Cooke. Honey Don't! marks their second collaboration and, like Drive-Away Dolls, it revels in B-movie excess. That shouldn't be...

"Out of hope, out of rope, out of time." - William Cobbs in the opening narration of The Hudsucker Proxy Tim Robbins has a knack for finding his way into superior satires. After taking the lead role in Robert Altman's The Player and starring...

For its first two-thirds, In Bruges is an intelligent, gently paced thriller about what happens to hitmen when they screw up. The movie crawls at a deliberate pace for most of its running length, allowing the characters to be fleshed out and offer...

For whatever reason, the Coen Brothers' comedies (such as Raising Arizona, The Hudsucker Proxy, and The Big Lebowski) have always garnered less critical attention than the filmmakers' more serious fare (such as Blood Simple, Barton Fink, and Fargo)...

The kids may be all right, but the adults aren't. That's the underlying premise of Lisa Cholodenko's unconventional family drama - a motion picture that uses wry humor and uncommon sensitivity to underscore some of the difficulties inherent in any...

The Ladykillers is an interesting concoction - a faithful update of the original Ealing comedy cooked in vat of Coen Brothers' seasoning. Even though this is based on the 1955 British film of the same name, those unfamiliar with The Ladykillers' p...