Search for Drama

It has been several years since I've read a book by John Grisham (I believe the last one was The Client). After three or four of Grisham's novels, I grew tired of the predictable repetitiveness and contrived suspense of the narratives. As a resul...

Raise the Red Lantern is one of the more sublimely beautiful and openly disturbing films of the 1990s. It is also the best work to date turned in by the actress/director combination of Gong Li and Zhang Yimou -- and this includes other impress...

It is fair to argue that, at least in the case of Rampart, Woody Harrelson is better than the material in which he appears. A cop story loosely based on real-life events, Rampart is cursed with a meandering script that mines overworked tunnels and ...

It wouldn't be a stretch to name legendary Japanese film maker Akira Kurosawa as one of the ten greatest motion picture directors of all time. Kurosawa's brilliant work speaks for itself, and, with over five decades of movie making to his credit, ...

Taylor Hackford's Ray has a tremendous performance by Jamie Foxx and a soundtrack that is jammed with recordings by the late Ray Charles, but both work in service of a paint-by-numbers screenplay that runs too long and could have been developed in ...

The Reader is closer to a near miss than a rousing success but, on balance, this is still worth seeing for those who enjoy complexity and moral ambiguity within the context of a melodrama. Based on the novel by Bernhard Schlink, the film asks bi...

A Real Pain, the sophomore effort from actor/writer/director Jesse Eisenberg, combines elements of a mismatched buddy dramedy with a travelogue. The latter transforms parts of Poland from a setting to a character. In fact, there are times when the...

Real Steel, despite being dubbed the "Rock-em/Sock-em Robot movie," seeks to achieve more than such a limiting nickname might imply. A fusion of three popular genres - the father/son relationship movie, the boy-and-his-dog movie, and the sports mov...

Spoilers Ahead! The movie is 68 years old and it's based on a novel that's even older, but one never knows… It is perhaps the height of irony that the only film directed by the "Master of Suspense" to win a Best Picture Oscar is a gothic melo...

Rebel in the Rye, which tells the story of author J.D. Salinger, falls into the pernicious trap that ensnares many a bio-pic: trying to present too broad a chronology in too limited a time. Utilizing an unwieldy structure that involves a flash...