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Calling The 400 Blows a "coming-of-age story" seems somehow inadequate. The label, while accurate, does not indicate either the uniqueness or the cinematic importance of this motion picture. These days, the average coming-of-age story tends to be...

Alien Nation arrived during a period when science fiction-themed action movies were all the rage. All sorts of variations on familiar themes were tried. Some, like James Cameron’s Aliens, were successful. Others, like Alien Nation, left some...

One of the longest films of the fall (both in terms of title length and running length) is The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. It seems every bit as long or longer than its 160 minutes. Parts of the movie are brilliant in a ...

Through the years, there have been many big-screen attempts to satirize James Bond, from the terrible misfire Casino Royale to the recent, even-worse Spy Hard. In between, even the "official" Bond series got in on the act -- during the Roger Moore...

D.W. Griffith’s 1915 silent movie, The Birth of a Nation, remains one of the most controversial epics ever committed to film. The bold, innovative techniques employed by the director are offset by a repugnantly racist second half that depicts m...

"I finished shooting The Blue Kite in 1992. But while I was involved in post-production, several official organizations involved with China's film industry screened the film. They decided that it had a problem concerning its political 'leanings,'...

I can easily see how the consensus reaction to Destination Wedding could be overwhelmingly negative. It’s not easy to spend 90 minutes in the company of two narcissistic, self-absorbed misanthropes. For Frank (Keanu Reeves) and Lindsay (Wino...

Floating around the art house circuit these days is a restored version of Henri-Georges Clouzot's 1955 murder mystery, Diabolique. Easily overlooked because of its limited re-release distribution, this picture may demand some active searching to u...

The idea underlying Fast Food Nation is intriguing: take the premise of the best-selling non-fiction book by Eric Schlosser and convert it into the backstory of a fictional film. Where director Richard Linklater runs into trouble is in the executi...

I stand in awe of Final Destination - awe that a motion picture of such unmitigated stupidity could make it to the screen. One short week ago, I berated both Mission to Mars and The Ninth Gate for the lack of intelligence evident in their screenpl...