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Little Women is a like Hamlet and Pride and Prejudice – the story is so well-known (and well-loved) that any new motion picture adaptation becomes more about screenwriting choices (what’s left in and what’s taken out) and performances. C...

Watching Lords of Dogtown, I momentarily became nostalgic for the summer of 1977, when I would ride my skateboard down my inclined driveway, then see if I could make the sharp turn onto the sidewalk without wiping out. But nostalgia is hardly a re...

Calling a motion picture Loser is a brave move because it places the film in a precarious position if the critical reaction is less enthusiastic than the producers expect. In this case, however, that's not an issue; this movie succeeds in a modest...

If there’s a rule to be aware of when it comes to Sony’s so-called “Spider-Verse” movies, it’s this: If Spider-Man isn’t in it, it’s likely to disappoint. That applies to Venom, Venom: Let There Be Carnage, Morbius, and now Madame Web...

Romantic comedies sell fantasy. Ultimately, that's their reason for being - to make even the most cynical heart crave true love. Some romantic comedies, this one included, fail because of an inability to convince the audience that the protagonists...

Call it the law of diminishing results. Akira Kurosawa’s 1956 classic The Seven Samurai (the first time this story was made into a movie) is a great film - a contender for one of the best 100 motion pictures of all time. (It’s at #32 on m...

I’ve long since given up asking the question “Why?” when it comes to filmmakers turning to foreign language films for the storylines of new English-language films. Sometimes, in fact, the results can be quite satisfactory – take the 2022 r...

There are times when A Man for All Seasons seems like an older, gentler uncle to George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones. (Martin was in part inspired by some of the more salacious and bloody episodes of English history, particularly during th...

The men in black at Columbia Pictures made the right decision when they elected not to screen Man of the House for critics. The film fails in so many ways that it's impossible to imagine it getting more than a handful of positive reviews; all but ...

Three adjectives spring to mind when describing Marie Antoinette: odd, irritating, and tedious. (The last in that list could be replaced by "boring.") This is a movie that never gets to the point, perhaps because it doesn't recognize what the point...