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The Postman, an Italian film from British director Michael Radford (White Mischief, The Elixir), is a charming piece of cinema that takes several comfortable formulas and expands upon them in ingenious and emotionally-satisfying ways. There's a li...

Powerful and bruising at its best, The Power of the Dog excels at character development – something that has always been in director Jane Campion’s wheelhouse. The pacing, however, is uneven. The movie is slow to start and ends on a note that ...

Precious (saddled with the unwieldy subtitle: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire) manages the task of being both heartbreaking and heart-warming, all without resorting to the kind of manipulation so often evident in dramas about underprivileged ki...

Watching The Prestige is like observing a magic act where the magician's sleight-of-hand isn't deft enough. The trick almost works, but not quite… With its mechanical twists and turns and lack of heart, the movie often resembles Sleuth in superf...

Pre-Victorian writer Jane Austen, who died in 1817, has had more books adapted for film in the last twelve months than prolific contemporary authors Michael Crichton and John Grisham. In a very real sense, the movie world is undergoing an "Austen ...

When Hollywood adapts, we get Bewitched and The Dukes of Hazzard. When the British film industry adapts, we get Shakespeare and Austen. This explains why there is another version of Pride & Prejudice to be digested. And, while nothing will come clo...

One of the most unfortunate aspects of a courtroom thriller is the tendency to degenerate into preposterous melodrama. It's as if the basic situation of having a person on trial for their life isn't inherently powerful enough. As a result, cheap...

It would be possible to write pages and pages comparing and contrasting the reality of Bill Clinton's 1992 Presidential campaign with the fictional one of Jack Stanton, the candidate in Primary Colors. Likewise, it would be equally possible to dev...

Halloween is rightfully considered to be the father of the modern slasher movie. Ultimately, all the Friday the 13ths, Nightmare on Elm Streets, and Screams owe their existence to that one low-budget film that crept its way across motion picture s...

[Click here to read my review of the original 1960 film.] There's no secret why this new version of Psycho exists. Redundant and unnecessary as it is, it will likely make money for Universal Pictures (a studio in dire need of a box office succe...