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At least at first, a viewer can be forgiven some consternation understanding what director Jean-Jacques Annaud is attempting to achieve with Quest for Fire. With its Neanderthal-like characters leaping around like apes, the film sometimes feels mo...

Gran Turismo is so desperate to get viewers to believe that it starts out with one of the greatest clichés of sports movies: Based on a true story. Of course, the words “based on” allow for a lot of liberties to be taken and, in the case of t...

Bloodshot suffers from a world-building failure. With too little time and emphasis placed on crafting the setting and exploring some of the rich possibilities of the milieu in which events transpire, the movie turns into little more than a ho-...

Playtime, the 1967 comedy from acclaimed French director Jacques Tati, is an odd film (even coming out of a tradition of filmmaking that prided itself on defying conventions and breaking barriers). With no real plot and little in the way of ch...

For some reason, there has been a move by a few critics to politicize their reviews of Mile 22, Peter Berg’s tightly-constructed espionage thriller. I guess one side-effect of living in a hyper-partisan era is that some films aren’t allowe...

With a studio as prolific as Blumhouse, whose mission is to prioritize profit over quality, there are bound to be occasional duds. To date, however, nothing with producer John Blum’s name attached has been quite as creatively bankrupt as Tru...

The Purge: Election Year represents writer/director James DeMonaco’s attempt to squeeze one more movie out of a premise that has run dry. The first movie of the series offered little more than The Concept - an alternate universe tale that took ...

The success of 2013's The Purge took everyone by surprise, including writer/director James DeMonaco, who was immediately called upon by distributor Universal Studios to pen a sequel. The result is The Purge: Anarchy, a story set in the same world a...

When critics bemoan the dumbing down of movies, they're talking about stuff like The Purge. This is quite possibly the most moronic motion picture I have seen thus far in 2013 and that's saying a lot. The movie has obviously been constructed for th...

When Rust and Bone tells a story of a woman's recovery from a devastating injury, it hits all the right notes, traveling a path that is poignant without being mawkish and triumphant without being saccharine. However, when it chronicles the life of...