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The best thing that can be said about the second Night at the Museum (which bears the unnecessarily long full title of Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian) is that it's harmless. And pointless. And dumb. This is a perfect example of a ...

Guillermo del Toro has taken us down some dark paths before, but this is the deepest and darkest he has gone, adapting the 1946 novel of the same name by William Lindsay Gresham (which was previously made into a movie in 1947). Set during the Grea...

I can kind-of, sort-of see how this story might work as a novel. Bad dialogue doesn't sound as howlingly awful when not spoken aloud. Idiotic plot contrivances don't seem as painful and obvious. A love affair depends only on the spell woven by t...

The Ninth Gate has two modes: tedious and moronic, with the two not being mutually exclusive. Then, one-hundred minutes into this seemingly interminable movie (which clocks in at about 2:10), things take a turn for the worse and The Ninth Gate spi...

It's always a tricky proposition to make a motion picture based on recent history -- and the more public the episode, the more difficult it is for the film maker to balance drama with accuracy. This is especially true when that film maker is Olive...

It's increasingly unusual that a thriller can claim to maintain its intensity for the entirety of its running length. No Escape is masterful at keeping the stakes high without confounding our so-called "suspension of disbelief." Unlike ...

No Hard Feelings is an odd movie in that films of this sort have fallen out of vogue in the 21st century and are rarely accorded any sort of theatrical release. (The box office results will determine whether the decision to reject a direct-to-stre...

Romantic comedies are a little like junk food: they're not healthy or sophisticated but, when made right, there's something addictive about their tasty familiarity. Going in, you know what you're going to get. There are no surprises, nasty or other...

Nobody's Fool is about as sublime a motion picture as is likely to come out of Hollywood. With a structure that contravenes the norm, this film concentrates on character first, letting the plot fall naturally into place. Situations are forced on ...

Non-Stop plays like what might happen if Michael Bay directed a screenplay developed for Alfred Hitchcock. The movie, while so utterly preposterous as to provoke guffaws, is presented in such a way that there's a building sense of tension. As a res...