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Whodunits are rarely a good playground for Hollywood films. The average mystery, whether a stripped-down Agatha Christie-esque tale or a more complex endeavor, is too demanding for the structural constraints of a motion picture. As a result, when o...

Canadian filmmaker Denis Villeneuve embraces a bleak worldview, or at least that's what his filmography would lead audiences to believe. His celebrated movies, which include Incendies, Prisoners, and now Sicario (and will soon add the long-gestat...

It's so easy -- too easy, in fact -- for a war movie to turn into a celebration of blood, death, and mayhem. Exploitation of wars and their dehumanizing affects has become a staple of American action films (First Blood, Missing in Action). Occasi...

James Marsh's The Theory of Everything is an unremarkable bio-pic about a remarkable man. Its ordinariness is in large part compensated for by an extraordinary performance from lead actor Eddy Redmayne. Those looking for a chronology of the life of...

Tolkien represents a classic standard-order biopic – a high-level profile of someone with minimal flesh on the bones. More like the dramatization of an Encyclopedia Britannica entry than a fully rendered movie, Tolkien provides details about ...