Search for John Toll

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...

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...

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...

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...

Following scathing audience reaction to a "work copy" of Elizabethtown shown at several major late-summer film festivals, writer/director Cameron Crowe went back to the drawing board, paring down the 138-minute "director's cut" to a slightly more m...

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...

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...

For Nancy Meyers, whose Hollywood career began with screenplay and producer credits for Private Benjamin and whose first stint behind the director's chair occurred in 1998 with the Lindsay Lohan remake of The Parent Trap (back when Lohan was still ...

One of the key aspects of any science fiction or fantasy saga is world (or universe) building. This process refers to the creation and development of the reality in which the story transpires. More than mere background, it informs plot development, c...