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Fantasy in the 1980s had a “cutesy” problem. Setting aside the deliciously bloody Schwarzenegger Conan the Barbarian, the field was littered with productions steeped in the belief that fantasy=children’s fare. Whether it was Disney’s b...

The Last Vermeer is something of an old-fashioned courtroom melodrama, complete with impassioned speeches, a sneering prosecutor, an antagonistic judge, and a last-minute gotcha! For those who enjoy this kind of “it only happens in the movie...

Legends of the Fall is the sort of epic melodrama that only Hollywood can do this well. It's a spectacle more than a show, with soaring moments of triumph and tragedy. Words like "restraint" and "subtle" are meaningless in this context. The late...

Looper is a tremendous motion picture experience. Not merely a "very good" one, but a great one. It delivers on all possible levels and its missteps are few and minor. It's a rousing science fiction/fantasy tale with a dose of hard-hitting drama, a...

What happens when a bored wife thinks her kindly old neighbor commits a murder? Woody Allen attempts to answer the question in his latest cinematic endeavor, Manhattan Murder Mystery. Carol Lipton (Diane Keaton) and her husband Larry (Woody A...

"In the last 20, 30 years, [Frankenstein has] been claimed by a whole generation of academics and scholars as a seminal piece of literature of that time. [It's] something which now, post-Freud, they feel reveals so many observations about family l...

Zorro, the swashbuckling hero of the undertrodden, was introduced to the world in 1919 when he debuted in the pages of Johnston McCulley's serialized novel, The Curse of Capistrano. Within a year, the masked man had appeared in a film, the silent ...

Arriving in the latter half of the summer, Danny DeVito's Matilda beats out such worthy contenders as The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Harriet the Spy for best family fare of the season. In fact, I haven't enjoyed a so-called "children's film" this...

If you’re in the mood for an overdose of (early) ‘80s nostalgia, Midnight Madness has your fix. Watching the film, which was made in 1980, offers a reflection of the kind of escapism that dominated the teen-oriented cinema of the era. Toda...