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Is Glengarry Glen Ross really about salesmen, or is it about a bankrupt culture that produces and nurtures them? Certainly, it stands alongside Wall Street as one of the most unflinching views of a mindset that informed a generation of salesmen and...

Glory is, without question, one of the best movies ever made about the American Civil War (a.k.a. "The War Between the States"). The reason isn't just the way in which Kevin Jarre's script illuminates a frequent oversight of history books, nor is ...

Sports movies, with all the requisite clichés attached, are a dime a dozen, and no one has done them better in recent years than Disney. With every year, the roster lengthens, and now includes all of the four major sports, plus golf. The thing t...

For most people, there is great comfort in routine. We cling to it like an old friend, drifting through life with the certain knowledge that tomorrow will be much like today, which is much like yesterday and the day before that. There's a certain...

If Martian Child is the price film goers must pay in order to get Grace Is Gone, then it's a worthwhile trade. This low-key drama, the directorial debut of James C. Strouse, is the kind of opportunity that real actors relish. With a minimalist plo...

It's one thing to tell people about the wounds in the fabric of this country that the Civil Rights movement attempted to repair; it's another thing to show them. Unfortunately, too many films made about racism during the first two-thirds of the 20...

Seen in standard (non-IMAX) 3-D. After several years of minimal screen presence, superheroes are coming back to multiplexes in 2011 with a vengeance. First out of the starting gate is Michael Gondry's re-imagination of The Green Hornet, a proper...

When it comes to bringing their top-line superheroes to the big screen, DC has been lagging behind Marvel in recent years. While Marvel has aggressively built franchises, DC has shown little inclination to attempt more than occasional new installm...

Guardians of the Galaxy represents Marvel's great experiment: a major motion picture based on a comic book series not featuring any "household name" superheroes. It takes place in outer space, a setting where few action/adventure movies have found...

In August 2014, Marvel Studios released Guardians of the Galaxy. At the time, it was considered to be a gamble: a sci-fi/superhero mashup featuring characters no one other than comic book die-hards would recognize. To raise awareness and genera...