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Machete Kills plays like a joke that's been told a few times too often. A lampoon of bad genre movies from the '60s and '70s with a '10s sensibility, the film is more like a collection of overcooked scenes than an actual narrative-based motion pict...

Mad Money is a comedy caper where the caper's not interesting and the comedy's not funny. Take away those elements and all that's left is a tepid female buddy movie and, like its male counterparts, we've had enough of those to choke a critic. It'...

Maybe at some point, the idea sounded good. Funny, perhaps. Clever even. A fish-out-of-water comedy drenched in enough blood to earn it a solid R-rating. But if there was any potential in the initial inspiration, it was frittered away. J. Michael ...

The battle lines surrounding The Magdalene Sisters were drawn long before it reached its limited North American theatrical distribution on August 1, 2003. The film, which shines a light into the shadowy recesses of religious/sexual repression in I...

Malena, the latest film from Italian director Giuseppe Tornatore, is a curious mix of whimsy and tragedy. Tornatore's blending of the divergent tones is not entirely successful - there are several jarring moments - but, on the whole, Malena works ...

I’ve long since given up asking the question “Why?” when it comes to filmmakers turning to foreign language films for the storylines of new English-language films. Sometimes, in fact, the results can be quite satisfactory – take the 2022 r...

Let me start with a few brief editorial comments about Lars von Trier. Key to understanding my views about Manderlay is my disclosure of a belief that in order to be able to criticize something, you have to have first-hand familiarity with it. Vo...

Mansfield Park has always been viewed as Jane Austen's most confounding novel. Scholars are divided over its literary merit, and many Austen-philes prefer to ignore its existence altogether, seeing it as a kind of "black sheep" in the author's cat...

I have never been a Raymond Chandler fan nor am I enamored with the pulp detective genre that was oh-so-popular during the early decades of the 20th century. Consequently, my only exposure to Philip Marlowe (Chandler’s most popular character) ha...

The filmmakers behind Marshall understand what it takes to make a successful bio-pic. Instead of using a “greatest hits” strategy that attempts to cram an entire life into two hours, they have targeted a single representative event from th...