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The most inventive moment in My Favorite Martian comes during the opening sequence. A robot Mars probe is shown slowly picking its way across the barren surface of the Red Planet. When its power supply finally gives out and it grinds to a halt, t...

Romantic comedies are fantasies. They invite us to fall in love with the main characters as they fall in love with each other. That's difficult to accomplish when viewers find themselves actively disliking those characters. How is it possible to...

Was there ever a bigger misuse of talent than the one evident in 1990’s My Blue Heaven? Not only were both leads, Steve Martin and Rick Moranis, miscast but the director, Herbert Ross (Steel Magnolias), is tone-deaf when it comes to comedic ...

Napoleon Dynamite should be required therapy for anyone with a self-image problem. No matter how much of a loser a person believes himself to be, he couldn't possibly be in worse shape than the protagonist of Jared Hess' wickedly funny high school...

Guilty pleasure (n): a film that a critic shamefacedly admits to liking even though the prevailing opinion, as put forth by serious members of the profession, is that the movie is a piece of crap. Christmas Vacation is considered by many film ...

How to review a movie that's essentially a copy of its predecessor? The temptation is to simply copy what I wrote about the first National Treasure into this space with a few minor edits to account for name and location changes. Everything from t...

Okay, no one anticipated that Need for Speed, the motion picture interpretation of the popular (and addictive) series of video games, would resemble Shakespeare. There was, however, a reasonable expectation that some of the adrenaline would transfe...

Welcome to cyberspace, the newest locale for the action-adventure film. Borrowing heavily from Alfred Hitchcock and John Grisham, director Irwin Winkler reduces a potentially-fascinating premise to the spearhead of a routine thriller. The Net sta...

Spoiler Alert: To the extent that the term "spoiler" can be applied to something this formulaic, I suppose I ought to warn readers that I talk in general terms about how the movie ends. What do you get when you mix A Christmas Carol with a subst...

For those familiar with director Shane Black’s oeuvre, The Nice Guys is closer to Kiss Kiss Bang Bang than Iron Man 3. Featuring the same blend of high octane action and Tarantino-esque humor as Black’s 2005 debut, The Nice Guys doubles as a come...