Search for King

The Shining is a curious motion picture. On the one hand, as a ghost story and adaptation of the Stephen King novel, it's largely a failure. On the other hand, as an example of directorial bravura and as a study of madness and the unreliable narr...

By any standards, Silk is a bad movie: pretentious, stillborn, devoid of emotion. It’s a perfect example of how awful direction and performances can ruin an adequate screenplay. Granted, what’s on paper isn’t perfect and it contains a number...

No subset of the horror genre has created a higher percentage of dogs than the werewolf movie. Since The Wolf Man reached screens in 1941, it has become possible to count the number of good films about lycanthropy on the fingers of one hand. The ...

Skyfall can take its place alongside From Russia with Love, Goldfinger, and On Her Majesty's Secret Service as the best Bond can offer. With an Oscar winner at the helm and Oscar winners in two prominent roles, Skyfall overflows with talent but, as...

There are movies that amble because the slow pace is necessary to provide insight into the characters and allow an overriding sense of atmosphere to envelop the viewer. Then there are movies whose slowness threatens to turn into stagnation and hel...

Sleuth, a 1972 "thinking person's thriller," is a rich, engaging motion picture with surprises lurking in the shadows behind every narrative corner. The film opens with a shot of Michael Caine making his way through a hedge labyrinth in search...

Slumdog Millionaire comes from director Danny Boyle and screenwriter Simon Beaufoy, who fashion what is at heart a romance into a mystery and a thriller with Dickensian undertones. It's tough not to think of David Copperfield when we see the "orph...

Smokin' Aces is Tarantino lite - a vague and unsuccessful attempt to bring together a bunch of offbeat, unrelated characters in a situation where a bloody resolution is inescapable. Like an absentminded chef, however, writer/director Joe Carnahan ...

Why would a successful director like Stephen Frears (Dangerous Liasons, The Grifters, Hero) go from the relative security of Hollywood to the near-obscurity of Ireland to make a little film like The Snapper? Frears himself supplied the answer by...