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For our cinematic introduction to the year 2005, I can offer an alternative two-word title to the one selected by Universal Pictures: Utter Crap. (There are more colorful possibilities, but I like to think of this website as family-friendly.) At le...

The filmmakers have decided to append the subtitle For Good onto this, the conclusion to their bifurcated adaptation of the insanely popular Broadway musical. An equally appropriate title might be Wicked: More of the Same, because that’s exactly...

Let me start out this review by asserting that those who consider themselves die-hard fans of the stage musical Wicked, upon which this movie is based, will almost certainly love what director Jon M. Chu (Crazy Rich Asians, In the Heights) has deli...

Perhaps the best thing about The Wild Robot is that it rarely feels like a Hollywood-produced animated film. It’s more Miyazaki than Disney. Although seemingly simple, it explores concepts like perceiving “kindness as a survival skill” and h...

Love in tennis doesn't have to be bad, as Richard Loncraine's Wimbledon shows. A formulaic motion picture that delights in spite of (or perhaps because of?) its reliance upon conventions, Wimbledon is the kind of movie that allows the non-cynical ...

"Even a man who is pure in heart and says his prayers by night, may become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms and the autumn moon is bright." If there’s another quote more closely associated with movies having “Wolf Man” in the title, I don’t...

All of the great Universal horror movies from the 1930s and 1940s have now been remade: Dracula, Frankenstein, The Mummy, and The Wolf Man. Over the years, there have been numerous cinematic encounters with lycanthropy, but The Wolf Man is to were...

How, one might ask, does one begin to defend Xanadu? To start with, by looking at it without any pretensions and seeing it for what it is. Conventional wisdom decrees that Xanadu is a horrible film. In a sense, conventional wisdom may be correct...

Where's the Kryptonite? What many movie producers fail to realize is that one of the keys to making a superhero interesting is to give him an Achilles heel - Kryptonite, so to speak. And one of the big problems with XXX: State of the Union is t...

Although the idea behind Yesterday was to craft a love-letter to The Beatles, the end result tastes a lot like a typical Richard Curtis rom-com with a generous helping of John-Paul-George-Ringo gravy. Less reliant on pop music than either Bohe...