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A marriage between the creative talents of David Mamet and Edward Zwick might seem to be an unlikely union but, in the case of 1986 feature About Last Night..., it is surprisingly effective. Zwick, best known for the emotional resonance he brings ...

In Ridley Scott’s All the Money in the World, Christopher Plummer’s performance is by far the best thing and the scenes in which he appears are the most compelling. The irony of those statements is evident since Plummer wasn’t in the ori...

Here's a word analogy: Amistad is to The Lost World as Schindler's List is to Jurassic Park. In 1993, after Steven Spielberg made the monster dino hit, many critics described Schindler's List as the director's "penance" (as if there was a need for...

As Good as It Gets is a perfect Christmas release, not because the story takes place during the Yule season, but because many of the plot elements are straight out of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol. There's more than just a little Scrooge in M...

Edgar Wright’s Baby Driver seeks to inject a dose of high octane into a heist film while illustrating how it’s possible to make a car chase exciting in an era when few action staples have become more boring and predictable. The film also s...

In my original, unpublished review of Basic Instinct (dated March 21, 1992), I wrote the following: "There's a fine line between eroticism and exploitation, and Basic Instinct treads it, using nudity, sex, and violence to cover up the limitations o...

The Beat that My Heart Skipped is director Jacques Audiard's re-imagination of James Toback's Fingers. Although Audiard and his co-writer, Tonino Benacquista, have retained the premise and some of the ideas of the original, this is, for the most par...

A case could be made that everything is made better with Mr. Rogers added to the mix. Take A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood. A standard-order redemption/salvation drama about healing a poisoned father/son relationship, this story is leavene...

When I think of a “Jason Statham movie,” I think of The Transporter. Or Crank. Or The Mechanic – all relatively mindless (but enjoyable) thrillers that understood the appeal of their deadpan leading man: his ability to give and take physical ...

If timing is everything then Black Widow has suffered from a buzzard’s luck in that regard. Starring a character who is already dead in the MCU, the movie is forced to pick through her past life in search of a viable story and, in terms of b...