Search for John Toll

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...

It's a genuine pleasure to come across a motion picture like The Last Samurai - a rousing tale that combines high adventure with emotional effectiveness. This movie works because it never loses sight of the characters no matter how epic the scope ...

Gone Baby Gone is powerful stuff - a movie that derives its plot twists from moral conundrums rather than from narrative sleight of hand. The best mystery novels are the ones that use the genre as a stepping-off point for developing characters and...

One of the best reviewed movies of 2000, Almost Famous is sure to appear on many critics' end-of-the-year Top 10 lists. A number of respected voices have already declared this to be the best film of the year. However, although there's no doubt th...

Legends of the Fall is the sort of epic melodrama that only Hollywood can do this well. It's a spectacle more than a show, with soaring moments of triumph and tragedy. Words like "restraint" and "subtle" are meaningless in this context. The late...

Harriet Tubman’s story as presented in Kasi Lemmons’ new feature, Harriet, is inspirational and crowd-pleasing. One of the most heroic figures on the mid-19th century abolitionist movement and the best remembered conductor on the Undergrou...

In the wake of the massive and massively successful The Avengers, Iron Man 3 wisely doesn't attempt to outdo its immediate superhero predecessor when it comes to big-time action, pyrotechnics, and special effects. Instead, it opts for something a l...

Based on a perusal of reviews for Cloud Atlas, one might be convinced that the sprawling, ambitious, epic adaptation of David Mitchell's 2004 novel is either a masterpiece or an unmitigated disaster. The reality is somewhere in between. It's hard t...

Vanilla Sky (the name refers to a painting by Monet) is the quirkily titled American remake of the 1997 Spanish language feature, Open Your Eyes. Like its predecessor, Vanilla Sky is a mind-bending excursion across genres - a warped fairy tale tha...

Perhaps the most surprising thing about The Adjustment Bureau is that, irrespective of the misdirection of the trailers and T.V. spots, this is more of a romance than a science fiction thriller. That's not to say the Twilight Zone aspects of the mo...