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The majority of this review is taken from what I wrote in 2009. I have tweaked and edited it to update it for 2022. Following the main review are a few new comments written following my re-watching of the film on September 23, 2022.Avatar has been d...

There have been two major waves of fantasy movies. The latest (and most would argue, the most successful) began in the late 1990s with the releases of The Fellowship of the Ring and Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. The earlier one occur...

Call it the law of diminishing results. Akira Kurosawa’s 1956 classic The Seven Samurai (the first time this story was made into a movie) is a great film - a contender for one of the best 100 motion pictures of all time. (It’s at #32 on m...

Some material is inherently better suited to documentary (rather than feature film) treatment. That’s the case with The 33, a “based on fact” account of the 2010 Chilean mining disaster that riveted news-watching populations worldwi...

Boxing movies are like romantic comedies: they come in neat packages, follow tried-and-true formulas, and rarely challenge conventions.  There are outliers, of course, like Martin Scorsese's brilliant Raging Bull, but those are rare. For the...

Where to go with Spider-Man? That's the billion dollar question that has plagued Sony Pictures. One of their flagship franchises, Spider-Man is a proven money-maker that could not be allowed to lie fallow simply because the creative engine ran out ...

In many ways, The Karate Kid is the perfect remake: faithful to the source material in large part yet offering enough nuanced differences to allow it to stand on its own. The problem with the film is that that story, hackneyed when it first made i...

Screened in standard (non-IMAX) digital 3D. Avatar has been described as a "game-changer," and perhaps it is. I'll leave that for future historians to determine. What I can say with some assuredness is this is the most technically amazing motio...

The crown jewel of 1995's summer blockbusters appears to have arrived early. It's hard to imagine any motion picture released between now and August matching Mel Gibson's Braveheart for spectacle. With its clashing armies, heartstopping action, a...

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 ...