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Over the last 20 years of his career, Steven Spielberg has often coupled a crowd-pleasing would-be blockbuster with a more serious-minded project. Thus, in 1993, he released Jurassic Park in tandem with Schindler's List. In 1997, there were The Los...

When it comes to dark satires of the romantic comedy genre, few films are more vicious than Danny DeVito's 1989 offering, The War of the Roses. The film revels in its blackness in a way that few films during the last several decades have; even th...

There's a longstanding movie riddle that asks the following question: Is it better to have a mediocre director and a great screenplay, or a great director and a mediocre screenplay? War of the Worlds, Steven Spielberg's entry into the 2005 summer...

As if it wasn't bad enough that Twilight defanged vampires, turning them into whiny emo Harlequin romance heroes, now Warm Bodies has done something similar for zombies. Granted, that latter evisceration is more challenging than the former. After a...

The Watchers, the feature debut of director Ishana Night Shyamalan, has the goods to assemble a compelling trailer. Sadly, it lacks the goods to make a compelling movie. With an uneven tone, a poorly constructed narrative, cheesy dialogue, stilted...

The primary draw for Water for Elephants is the pairing of Reese Witherspoon and Robert Pattinson (ignore the ten year age gap) in a love story based on the best-selling novel by Sara Gruen. Sadly, passion and romance are two ingredients missing fr...

Tilda Swinton is a chameleon unafraid of any subject matter, no matter how hard-hitting or difficult. She has appeared in one of the most emotionally crushing films I have ever seen, Tim Roth's The War Zone, and her performance in We Need to Talk a...

Loyalty. Betrayal. Violence. Family. Those are the crucial staples to be found in any crime drama worth viewing, and writer/director James Gray shoehorns them into his high wattage effort, We Own the Night. Despite a plot that occasionally creaks...

The screen adaptation of Delia Owens’ Where the Crawdads Sing, written by Lucy Alibar and directed by Olivia Newman, comes with a built-in audience – the novel has (to date) sold 12 million copies and, if only a fraction of those readers pays ...

Welcome to the lurid world of Atom Egoyan, B-grade schlock filmmaker. Until seeing Where the Truth Lies, I never would have considered applying this title to Egoyan, the eclectic filmmaker of some of the '90s most compelling features (Exotica and T...