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In recent years, I have become jaded about superhero movies, a genre I once enjoyed. A sameness and lack of energy permeates them, especially the origin stories. There's something perfunctory and unsatisfying about many of the big titles, leaving i...

Thematically, James Ponsoldt’s The Circle (based on the novel by Dave Eggers) takes its cues from George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Grand aspirations, to be sure, and ones that are never truly met. From its beginn...

You know an animated film is doing something right when it brings tears to the eyes. Coco may not represent Disney/Pixar at its pinnacle but it’s close enough to the top to warrant consideration as the best computer-drawn film of 2017. Of cou...

Cowboys & Aliens is a mashup of a mediocre Western and a mediocre science fiction story. The resulting film is far better than the sum of its two seemingly disparate parts. Although a little overlong, the production will find favor not only with l...

Crimson Peak works as an homage to 19th century gothic literature. Beyond that mission statement, however, it has trouble gaining traction. Although the film may hold a certain appeal for those who have spent long hours thumbing through the pages of ...

It takes guts to remake a movie that is commonly considered a classic. Of course, that hasn't stopped filmmakers in the past - attempts have been made to modernize such "untouchables" as Casablanca and It's a Wonderful Life, with predictably unfor...

Of the eight movies committed to celluloid by director Kenneth Branagh, five of them have been either adapted from one of Shakespeare's plays (Henry V, Much Ado About Nothing, Hamlet, Love's Labour's Lost) or have made significant use of the Bard's...

Watching The Debt, I was reminded of how entertaining a well-executed Cold War thriller can be. Although elements of this movie, based on the 2007 Israeli film Ha-Hov, have a kinship to Steven Spielberg's Munich, the overall thrust is more in line ...

Despite the “based on a true story” label, Deepwater Horizon is structured not so much as a fictionalized chronicle of actual events as it is an old-fashioned disaster movie. Although the genre has recently been overrun by apocalyptic sce...

Showing great restraint and refusing to demonize the closed community in which the story transpires, director Sebastian Lelio has tackled the age-old tale of forbidden love and its implications for those who fight for freedom and choice while ...