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When I first saw High Tension at the 2003 Toronto Film Festival, I wrote the following: " [High Tension] has virtually no chance of finding a North American distributor. After all, what's the market for slasher films with subtitles?" Imagine my ...

The story of celebrated cellist Jacqueline du Pré is too good not to have been made into a movie. However, the most gratifying thing about director Anand Tucker's Hilary and Jackie is that it not only does it tell the tale, but does it so a uniqu...

Although director Alain Resnais was never a card-carrying member of the French New Wave, his films influenced those who were (in particular, Godard, Truffaut, and Rohmer). Stylistically and thematically, Hiroshima Mon Amour remains one of the ...

In 2001, only a few months after the fall of the World Trade Center, Peter Jackson swept us away to Middle Earth with The Fellowship of the Ring. It was a wondrous three-hour achievement: the first major attempt at serious, big budget epic fantasy....

In 2005, genre fans were able to celebrate the day when the entire six-film Star Wars saga was available for public consumption. Nine and one-half years later, the same can be said of Peter Jackson's Middle Earth epic. As George Lucas learned, th...

Special effects have always played an important role in Peter Jackson's adaptations of J.R.R. Tolkien's books but, with The Desolation of Smaug, the middle chapter of The Hobbit movie trilogy, they take center stage. This isn't necessarily a positi...

Hope Springs has the unusual distinction of providing a sample of what an Ingmar Bergman movie might be like if made for mass American consumption. The production leavens the painful psychological introspection that defined the Swedish director's b...

Sometimes, it's all about the cast. That comment isn't meant to disparage the scriptwriting of Michael Markowitz, John Francis Daley, and Jonathan Goldstein, who offer their share of amusing situations and snappy one-liners, or the direction of Se...

Hulk represents the most involving superhero motion picture since >Superman soared skywards in 1978. By taking its time to develop characters and situations, Hulk does what so many action/adventure movies fail to do - allow us to really feel for t...

Have we reached a point where the term "young adult literature" has become pejorative? Have books like Twilight and its ilk promulgated a negative connotation? If Stephenie Meyer's scribblings represent an exhibition for the prosecution, perhaps Su...