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On some level, I feel that I should have been able to enjoy Into the Blue. It has all the elements one would expect from a "so bad it's good" feature: cheesy dialogue, a script that could have been written by two chimpanzees, acting that would mak...

Frank Capra's It Happened One Night represents one of the great romantic comedy "templates." Although the film has officially been remade a handful of times (most not in English), its opposites-attract melding of screwball comedy and the road trip...

For the first time in more than a decade, teen films are all the rage. Stars from TV shows like "Dawson's Creek" and "Party of Five" are crossing over to the big screen in droves, resulting in such lackluster fare as Can't Hardly Wait and She's Al...

When I was three years old and my playmates were happily watching Sesame Street and cartoons, I would sit in front of the television and gaze at the force of nature that was Julia Child (I also liked Graham Kerr, The Galloping Gourmet). Her larger...

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 experience of sitting through Just Go with It, Adam Sandler's umpteenth comedy directed by good buddy Dennis Dugan, is akin to watching a bad sit-com that never ends. With some TV shows, commercial breaks provide welcome relief from the monoton...

Karate Kid: Legends feels like glorified fan fiction. It has all the earmarks of something made by a fan primarily for fans. The overstuffed 94-minute feature aggressively strip-mines the previous five films (plus the series Cobra Kai) in an attem...

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...

When The Karate Kid was first released during the summer of 1984, it came into theaters unheralded. Despite the minimal fanfare and irrespective of its lack of a big-name movie star, it became the sleeper hit of the season and one of the year’s ...