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To the degree that "sophistication" would become one of the characteristics defining Academy Award Best Picture winners, that criterion was not yet in place when The Broadway Melody received its citation in 1930. One part air and one part cheese, ...

Call Me by Your Name, the latest film from Italian director Luca Guadagnino, is a study in mood and emotion. It’s about living in the moment and capturing that moment. It’s about using the canvas of film to convey to the audience the inner...

It's a curious thing. Whenever this much talent is assembled for a motion picture, the result inevitably seems to be a letdown. And to say that Charlie Wilson's War is topheavy with talent is to understate the matter. The cast features three Osc...

It’s refreshing to find a teen romance that doesn’t feel obligated to end with a confession of undying affection. In real life, which Chemical Hearts seeks to emulate, high school love affairs may result in fumbling in the dark, loss of vi...

Children of Men, Alfonso Cuarón's adaptation of the P.D. James novel, takes a look at England in an apocalyptic near-future, when standards of law and order have broken down and the country is ruled by a fascist dictator. The movie is set in 2027...

Thematically, James Ponsoldt’s The Circle (based on the novel by Dave Eggers) takes its cues from George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Grand aspirations, to be sure, and ones that are never truly met. From its beginn...

The average movie about the abortion debate tends to be preachy, melodramatic, and unbearably solemn. So, it comes as something of a shock that the latest venture to the front line of the pro-life/pro-choice battle is actually a comedy. Director/...

It's interesting to note that, as Kevin Smith has changed and matured as a filmmaker, he has elected to close the circle and look back from a perspective of a dozen years at the movie that put him on the indie map, Clerks. Clerks II is a direct se...

The passage of time has not been kind to the filmography of Kevin Smith. Most of his movies have a “stuck in amber” quality that makes them most interesting as a reflection of the era in which they were made. His two best efforts, Clerks ...