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It is well known that superlative film editing can save a mediocre motion picture. Sadly, the opposite can also be true. A case in point is Any Given Sunday, which, despite a potentially engaging story and a number of good performances, is at tim...

It’s the early 1990s and Lee Israel (Melissa McCarthy) is already well past her sell-by date. An author specializing in biographies (she once landed on the New York Times bestseller list for one she wrote about game show panelist Dorothy Kil...

In many ways, The Forgiven feels like a CliffsNotes version of a longer, more complex narrative. But, even considering that numerous subplots might benefit from a mini-series approach to the material, the transformation of the central character is...

Since Jeff Bridges optioned the rights to Lois Lowry's The Giver shortly after its 1993 publication, the tale has been on a slow track to production. Bridges, however, didn't give up and, although his original choice for the title character passed ...

The Hate U Give is a coming-of-age story – an unconventional one, to be sure, but a coming-of-age story nonetheless. It’s also an exploration of race in America. In an of itself, there’s nothing unique about that but this movie, directed...

I don’t know whether co-writer/director Brett Haley developed The Hero with Sam Elliott in mind but, regardless, the fit is perfect. A character actor best known for appearing in Westerns, Elliott made himself a recognizable fixture on TV an...

Ride is a slickly-made thriller that takes place almost entirely within the confines of an automobile. Unlike Tom Hardy’s Locke, however, this isn’t a one-man show. In this case, there are three players and the interaction among them prov...

I wanted to like this movie more than I actually did, because it addresses a couple of provocative issues head-on, without too much sugar coating. The first is the Hollywood tendency to devalue middle-age female actors, relegating them to supporti...

Clint Eastwood's reputation as a Hollywood icon was founded on two roles: The Man with No Name, who starred in three of Sergio Leone's "Spaghetti Westerns" (A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, The Good The Bad and the Ugly), and "Dirty" H...