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“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...

In many ways, The Karate Kid is the perfect remake: faithful to the source material in large part yet offering enough nuanced differences to allow it to stand on its own. The problem with the film is that that story, hackneyed when it first made i...

There are times when a movie looks a lot better on screen than it sounds from a description, and Kekexili: Mountain Patrol is an example. The one-sentence synopsis of the movie makes it sound like a dull, quasi-documentary conservationist picture ...

Kung Fu Hustle is an action/comedy designed with lovers of the '60s and '70s Shaw Brothers' movies in mind. It's an homage to a genre that, despite being regarded as campy by about 95% of the movie-going populace, has nevertheless captured the hea...

The careers of filmmakers David Lean and Bernardo Bertolucci overlapped for a short span (Lean’s best years coming prior to Bertolucci’s breakthrough) but, when the controversial Italian director released his celebrated epic The Last Emper...

Looper is a tremendous motion picture experience. Not merely a "very good" one, but a great one. It delivers on all possible levels and its missteps are few and minor. It's a rousing science fiction/fantasy tale with a dose of hard-hitting drama, a...

Ang Lee's follow-up to Brokeback Mountain is Lust, Caution. The film's receipt of an NC-17 by the MPAA was dutifully noted by the mainstream media, as was the distributor's (Focus Features) decision not to appeal the rating. NC-17 movies aren’t r...

When The Meg was released in 2018, it did strong enough international business to warrant a sequel. Although not entering blockbuster territory, it crossed the $100M mark in both the United States and China, reassuring producers that the multinati...

In a way, I feel like the victim of a bait-and-switch scheme.  The movie I saw isn’t the one advertised in the trailers. As marketed, The Meg looks like a breezy, campy monster movie that supersizes Jaws with an infusion of Jurassic Park. I...

Oh, the humanity! If the pandemic precludes one person from seeing Roland Emmerich’s Moonfall, then it has accomplished something positive.For two hours, I sat in a movie theater in a state of utter stupefaction. How, I wondered, did this movie ...