Movies with cinematographer Dean Semler

If Vin Diesel is looking for a third franchise to add to his resume, The Last Witch Hunter might be considered a “safe” option. His character, Kaulder, an 800+ year old warrior for the forces of good, doesn’t require Diesel to step ...

Maleficent might best be described as an alternate universe re-imagination of Sleeping Beauty. Taking a page from Wicked (the stage show that presents Oz from the witches' perspective), Linda Woolverton's screenplay presents an inverted version of ...

Back in the 1980s, when Sylvester Stallone was at his peak and the Rocky movies were arriving at regular intervals, there was an ongoing joke that, 20 or 30 years from then, Stallone would be doing Rocky 15 with the pugilist using a walker to get a...

Secretariat joins Disney's pantheon of sports movies about underdogs that defy odds and become champions. Of all the movies in this group (which includes Remember the Titans, The Rookie, Invincible and Miracle), this is the least effective, in lar...

There's a reason why so many action/comedies are failures. This is as true for more obvious misfires like The Bounty Hunter and Cop Out as it is for minor infractors like Date Night, an affable but ultimately forgettable example of the genre. In ...

If, as is believed in certain fringe circles, the world will come to an end in 2012, at least there will be no more movies like this one made. Perhaps the strangest thing about 2012 is that the bad parts of the film are among the most enjoyable, b...

It would be interesting to know what contribution (if any) credited screenwriter Alexander Payne (Election, Sideways) made to the final draft of I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry. Except for the cloying, strident preachiness of the third act, th...

There was a time when the western was one of Hollywood's most popular genres. Whether it was Gary Cooper standing tall in High Noon, Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas taking out the Clantons in Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, John Wayne fighting the Apa...

Are a few good laughs worth wasting 100 minutes of time? For me, the answer is a resounding "No!" There are far more promising avenues to explore in the quest for laughter than the dead-end represented by Jim Carrey's latest endeavor, Bruce Almig...

The Mad Max trilogy is pure adrenaline - a quality that was not lost when the franchise received an injection of American money for its third installment. The essential formula is straightforward, and involves a lot of fights and chases. The film...