Search for Columbia

Following the disastrous Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (my selection for the worst film of 1994), it's a safe bet that Gus Van Sant's next move had to be a proverbial "step in the right direction." In fact, with the biting satire To Die For, the dir...

Tootsie works for three reasons: a sharp screenplay, good comic timing, and delightful performances. There's nothing deep or philosophical about the film. It doesn't try to solve the world's problems or uncover some great social truth. It's a ge...

It's a hard thing for a filmmaker, even an accomplished one, to make a project "his own" when the original is well remembered as a vehicle for a star as big as Arnold Schwarzenegger. A mere 22 years have passed since the Schwarzenegger/Paul Vehoeve...

Given the screenplay for The Tourist, Alfred Hitchcock would have hired Cary Grant (or Jimmy Stewart) and Grace Kelly. Then he would have applied his particular brand of magic - the one that allowed him to sell the improbable - and an engaging rom...

Hollywood, it seems, has lost the knack of how to make a good romantic comedy. The best two such films of 2009, Adventureland and (500) Days of Summer, have come down the indie trail. The major studios are unwilling to fund any production that do...

Tell me if you’ve heard this refrain before: The experience of playing a game is more rewarding than watching a movie adaptation. Sadly, this applies as much to Uncharted as to nearly every previous game-to-movie translation. Even Uncharted, tou...

At first glance, Vantage Point looks like it might be inspired by Rashomon - different points-of-view of an incident leading to some greater revelation about the nature of truth. However, while the decision to reveal the story like a puzzle throug...

Venom represents the final result of a long-standing attempt by Sony Pictures to give the popular Spider-Man nemesis his own film. Influenced equally by the comic books and the Deadpool movies, Venom falls considerably short of the high bar s...

If 2018’s Venom felt like an afterthought, then the sequel, Venom: Let There Be Carnage, feels like an afterthought to an afterthought. With its short running length, this drunk-on-CGI production is less a movie and more the outline of somet...

In 2018, an argument could have been made that a Venom-centric movie was sensible, preferably as a lead-in to the expected big-screen clash between the inky symbiont and his web-crawling nemesis, Spider-Man. (The previous motion picture throwdown ...