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Apparently, the producers of Jumanji wanted this film to be a Jurassic Park for 1995's holiday season. If so, it's a badly misplaced, and ultimately futile, hope. For, although no one would suspect Steven Spielberg's 1993 dino-picture of having a...

Perhaps there are interesting directions in which the filmmakers could have taken the Jumanji series – after all, the 2017 reboot, Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, was vast improvement over the mid-1990s original. Unfortunately, driven by Hol...

Every year, there are a handful of pleasant and unpleasant surprises in multiplexes. Count Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle among the former. A tremendous improvement over the tepid 1995 original, this quasi-sequel brings humor, fun performances,...

The process of transforming beloved animated classics into live-action versions has become a modern cottage industry. This self-cannibalization has included titles like Cinderella, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, and now The Jungle Book (with Beauty and...

The new Ivan Reitman/Arnold Schwarzenegger comedy is a one-joke affair, and it takes surprisingly little time for the potential humor in the situation to wear thin. As a result, the viewer is left with about ninety minutes of suffering through S...

A word about spoilers in this review: For the most part, I have tried to avoid them. However, there is one development that I will openly reference. For many people, especially those who know about the behind-the-scenes details, this won’t b...

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...

Are you a Kevin Hart fan?  Then drop everything and rush to see this movie. Are you not a Kevin Hart fan? Then move along, there’s nothing here to see… When it comes to theatrically distributed recordings of comedy concerts, Eddi...

Obvious Stand By Me references aside, The Kings of Summer comes across as little more than a TV sitcom with enough swear words included to earn it an "R" rating. There's a little John Hughes vibe here, too: the adults are all idiots and the kids ar...