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In July 1967, civil unrest resulting from the brutality of the predominantly white Detroit police department reached a boiling point. The result, which history has named the “12th Street Riot”, was one of the deadliest and destructive riots in...

Dirty Deeds boasts a passably entertaining idea that is butchered in the telling. The underlying premise offers the opportunity for some Animal House/American Pie/Revenge of the Nerds-style entertainment, but the unfunny screenplay and inadequate ...

On July 2, 2018, Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi entered the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey to obtain paperwork necessary for his planned marriage…and never emerged. His disappearance quickly became a major news story and, as details c...

Warning: Significant spoilers starting in Paragraph #4. (But, in a case like this, do plot details really matter?) Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier has gone from Dogma to Dogville. The director's latest, a three-hour political allegory, has fu...

At one time, a new Brian De Palma film was something to be greeted with enthusiasm. The filmmaker, with his affinity for borrowing from the greats (Hitchcock in particular), understood how to put his own, modern spin on classic tropes. His rep...

Donnie Darko, the debut feature from writer/director Richard Kelly, is part psychological thriller and part science fiction mystery. The title character (Jake Gyllenhaal), a teenager in his last year of high school, is suffering from all manner of ...

Downfall is the third major filmed account of Hitler's final ten days, following in the distant wake of 1973's Hitler: The Last Ten Days and 1981's The Bunker. A superior production to both of the earlier movies, Downfall is a windfall for anyone w...

It seems that an inordinate number of movies produced by BBC Films take us back in time to an England That Was, where class structures were as rigid as women's corsets and royalty meant more than a ceremonial title. In many cases, there's a samene...

Sometimes, a movie just can't live up to its advertising campaign (or its name, for that matter). Dumb and Dumber is one such case. Take the newspaper ad, for example, filled with all those fake, witty quotes. That's rather clever (although not o...

It requires only four words to describe Earth: glorious photography, annoying narration. Essentially, Earth is a blown up (for the big screen), dumbed-down (for a young audience) version of the spectacular TV mini-series, Planet Earth. There's no ...