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Whenever a movie is released that seeks to tantalize the taste buds through the sheer force of its visual imagery, most critics feel duty-bound to advise potential viewers not to see the film on an empty stomach. That warning applies here, althoug...

The ghost of Mark Twain looms large over Jeff Nichols' Mud, a modern-day homage to the settings and characters popularized in some of Twain's best loved works. The protagonists in Mud, a couple of 14-year olds, are named Ellis (Tye Sheridan) and Ne...

There was a time when David Lynch made coherent, challenging motion pictures. Love it or hate it, there's no doubt that Blue Velvet was one of the most talked-about motion pictures of the 1980s. Some consider it to be a masterpiece, while others vi...

When Universal Pictures remade The Mummy in 1999, they wisely opted for a radically different tone, shifting from the atmospheric horror of the 1932 original to a Raiders of the Lost Ark-style adventure motif. Now, for the third major film to b...

The "1600" in the title, Murder at 1600, refers to a house number on Pennsylvania Avenue: the address of the White House. That makes this the third movie in three months (following Shadow Conspiracy and Absolute Power) to deal with high-level gov...

Must Love Dogs is a product - a pre-packaged, easily-digestible motion picture designed with one particular audience in mind. You know the kind of film. You have seen it before, usually with names like Nancy Myers or Nora & Delia Ephron involved....

Gerard Depardieu's interpretation of Cyrano De Bergerac was a definitive character in modern cinema, not to mention a jewel in the crown of his career. In fact, he was so impressive in that role that the producers of the comedy My Father the H...

Words cannot express how weary I am of watching lifeless, hollow movies like My Life in Ruins - generic romantic comedies that have no clue when it comes to either "romance" or "comedy." The films aren't quite poorly enough made to label them "bad...

When it comes to historical epics, Ridley Scott has a checkered past and Napoleon, his bio-pic of the early-19th century ruler of France, doesn’t change that. An uneven and historically questionable examination of the man behind the legend, the ...

Despite his reputation as one of America's foremost "serious" filmmakers, Oliver Stone's name under the "director" caption does not guarantee a good movie. I learned that lesson while enduring the seemingly-endless tedium of The Doors, and was rem...