Search for Hell

When Boynton Beach Club began life, it was called The Boynton Beach Bereavement Club. Director Susan Seidelman, considering the somber nature of the original appellation, shortened the title with an eye toward marketing. Even with the new name, h...

Perhaps the kindest way to describe Anthony Minghella's Breaking and Entering is to say it's evident as being broken fairly early during the proceedings. There's no shortage of candidates for the fatal flaw: the artificial storyline; the presence o...

The era of the Universal classic monster movies lasted from 1931, when the studio released Dracula (featuring Bela Lugosi’s iconic portrayal), until 1948 when Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein took the venerable horror figures into parod...

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...

It's fair to say that superhero saturation has set in. Not many years ago, every cinematic version of a comic book protagonist's adventures was awaited with baited breath. Now, because of an unceasing and sometimes careless flood of such titles, ma...

Chappie, the latest science fiction endeavor from South African director Neill Blomkamp, isn't just a disappointment; it represents a misfire. It's as if the filmmaker took a number of recognizable science fiction tropes, tossed them into a b...

Based on a perusal of reviews for Cloud Atlas, one might be convinced that the sprawling, ambitious, epic adaptation of David Mitchell's 2004 novel is either a masterpiece or an unmitigated disaster. The reality is somewhere in between. It's hard t...

It's not often that, when the primary thread of a movie fails, the secondary storylines are compelling enough to make the overall experience a positive one. However, that occurs with Cold Mountain, a Civil War era romance where the love affair fiz...

Rarely has the question "What the hell?" been more appropriate. An uneven amalgamation of the brilliant and the preposterous, Constantine left me by turns intrigued, confused, and wary. The recipe calls for some ingredients that are compelling, o...