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It's a pleasant change of pace to get a vampire movie where the bloodsuckers are allowed to be monsters. You know what I'm talking about - no more of this brooding, tortured soul shit. The undead here are hardcore killers, ripping apart their vic...

Because I Said So is a made-to-order romantic comedy of the type "B" variety (that's the one where the heroine is torn between the socially and financially "ideal" guy and the one who really makes her happy). As I have previously written, a formul...

Call it The Golden Compass rule: No multi-part movie series should be started without a reasonable certainty that the story will be told in full. And, although The Golden Compass’ planned sequels were the first recent films to fall afoul of t...

Poker is one of those games that, unless you're a die-hard, is a lot more fun to play than to watch. Nevertheless, because on-line poker sites have become so popular in recent years, there has been a upsurge in TV poker shows. The unfortunate byp...

The underlying premise of Devil is the kind of thing Alfred Hitchcock could have used to develop a tightly-wound, pulse-pounding suspense movie. Unfortunately, Hitchcock is dead and the two men shepherding Devil through its production are not near...

While watching Disney's Dinosaur, with all of its incredibly rendered creatures and seamless blending of animated objects with real backgrounds, a question occurred to me: In movies like this, can the writing keep pace with the technology? Films ...

When we first meet Ethan Frome (Liam Neeson), he is a broken man hobbling around town. The new preacher takes an interest in him and soon learns the tragic tale of Frome's life. Years ago, as a younger and more hale man, Ethan married Zeena (Joan...

The question: If it looks, sounds, feels, and tastes like a Hallmark made-for-TV movie, why has Extraordinary Measures received a theatrical release? The answer: Harrison Ford. Ford doesn't do TV, or at least he hasn't since appearing in an episod...

Auschwitz, 1944. One of the darkest times in one of the darkest places in recent human history. The images are stark and unforgettable: furnaces belching black smoke, lifeless corpses piled atop one another like firewood, and gray ash - the inci...

Hard Candy is the kind of uncompromising independent motion picture that is likely to foster ambivalence in a significant portion of its audience. Admittedly, the film doesn't stand up well to a careful postmortem (many psychological thrillers don...