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The trailer for Splice might lead a viewer to expect a low-budget retread of Species crossed with Aliens. However, although the film does indeed pilfer a scene directly from the latter movie, the trailer misrepresents its source. Splice is as muc...

The Square is an indicator that not only Hollywood blockbusters can be afflicted with bloat. At nearly 2 1/2 hours in length, this production takes what could have been a lean, incisive satire of art, commerce, and altruism and turns it into a...

There was a time when it was considered "daring" or "risky" to make a comedy-tinged war movie. In the early 1950s, with the scabs from World War II still in evidence and the United States enmeshed in Korea, war didn't seem to be a lighthearte...

The passage of time has labeled 1983’s Staying Alive as a turkey, but the contemporaneous view (at least to Paramount’s bean counters) was somewhat different. Although critics lambasted the movie upon its release, with Roger Ebert giving an es...

David Lynch's body of work is surely one of the most recognizable of any living director. From the nightmarishness of his debut, Eraserhead, to the bleakness of Blue Velvet to the bizarrely compelling quality of his TV series, "Twin Peaks," Lynch ...

Summer Hours is about death, but not death in the way that it is often packaged and sold to us in movies. Defining grief is a difficult thing. Why do we mourn? Do we grieve for the person who has died or for the ones he (or she) has left behind?...

Sundown is draped in a haze of uncertainty, with writer/director Michel Franco (Chronic, After Lucia) intentionally obscuring key details at the outset to keep the audience in a state of partial awareness. This lends a tint of mystery to what, tol...

1950 was a very good year for movies that took a look behind the showbiz scene. Both Sunset Blvd. (films) and All About Eve (theater) collected their share of Oscar nominations, with Eve beating out Sunset in the key Best Picture category. Howeve...

Note: This review contains spoilers. Those who wish to have a completely "fresh" viewing experience of this movie should return after seeing it. The concept of involving a female mystery writer in a crime is not a new plot device. In fact, fr...

Does the fact that Tag is loosely based on a real story make it more enjoyable? Not really, although it illustrates the absurdity of some human endeavors. It’s a red herring designed to distract from an underlying truth about this movie: it ...