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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 ...

The original Clerks was a trailblazing mid-1990s indie comedy whose love of profanity and pop culture references made it an unlikely art house success story while jump-starting the career of writer/director Kevin Smith. Although Clerks remains amu...

Collateral is a classic example of how casting against type can sometimes result in a remarkable success. Here we have Tom Cruise, who has spent the majority of his career playing the good-looking, likeable, action/romantic lead, placed into the r...

If one was going to cite a movie title for truth in advertising, it might be James Mangold’s Bob Dylan bio-pic, A Complete Unknown because, at the end of the proceedings, it’s an apt description of the main character. The reason it clear: Mang...

Regarding a concussion as a serious brain injury is a relatively recent phenomenon. For many years, “getting your bell rung” (as the expression goes) was something people were expected to shrug off. For sports, the fix was to take a coupl...

It has been a long time since I came as close to walking out of a movie as I did with Confessions of a Shopaholic. Not only did I find this production to be irritating, unfunny, and lacking in entertainment value, but I found its underlying slavis...