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I have always felt that Fellini is an acquired taste, and it’s one for which I never developed a ravenous appetite. While I value the director’s flamboyancy, his work has never connected with me in the same way as the output of many of the...

It takes something lackluster like The Amazing Spider-Man 2 to remind viewers why movies like Captain America: The Winter Soldier are considered superior. In the superhero genre, it's too easy to become sloppy and fall back on clichés. The fifth S...

American Gangster is compelling in the same way that many mob-related motion pictures are compelling, but it fails to achieve the greatness that the best of them attain. The problem with American Gangster may be that it tries to hard to provide bal...

It's hard to believe that The American President was made by the same man responsible for the no-holds-barred satire of This Is Spinal Tap. Is there any element of American culture more ripe for the humorist's razor-sharp wit than presidential pol...

Quentin Tarantino didn't originate the method of blending extreme violence with dark comedy but his early films (especially Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction) popularized it for today's generation. Since the early 1990s, many directors have att...

With a title like And So It Goes, it would be reasonable to expect something generic and forgettable - and that would be in line with what the film delivers. Everything about the movie is as uninspired as the title. More bland than bad, And So It G...

Sometimes movies don't have to be complicated. They don't have to "say" anything or espouse a particular philosophy. There doesn't have to be a deeper meaning beyond exploring slices in the lives of several unpretentious characters. Such is the c...

Two elements comprise a comedy: content and composition. The first relates to what the joke is about; the second refers to how the joke is told. Good humor can be ruined by bad composition - think of someone who tells a "funny story" but messes up ...

Barbarians starts out as a tense psychological thriller unfolding against the tableau of a not-so-friendly dinner before morphing into something decidedly physical and creepy. Yet the home invasion that flips the movie at the halfway point doesn�...

Filtered through a prism of Italian neo-realism, The Battle of Algiers is an unflinching portrayal of how high-minded ideals get trampled underfoot in the heat of war. The film is relevant to modern-day audiences not so much in the specificity ...