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I went to Machete expecting an exploitation film and got a socio-political lecture instead. Although an exaggeration, that's the way it sometimes felt. Director Robert Rodriguez understands the exploitation genre and delivers everything one crave...

Machete Kills plays like a joke that's been told a few times too often. A lampoon of bad genre movies from the '60s and '70s with a '10s sensibility, the film is more like a collection of overcooked scenes than an actual narrative-based motion pict...

Machine Gun Preacher uses the "real-life" story of Sam Childers (Gerard Butler) as the framework for a movie that is part drama, part action, and part social conscience. Like Hotel Rwanda, it seeks to provide a human context to one of Africa's most...

Romantic comedies sell fantasy. Ultimately, that's their reason for being - to make even the most cynical heart crave true love. Some romantic comedies, this one included, fail because of an inability to convince the audience that the protagonists...

With Magnolia, director Paul Thomas Anderson has segued into the realm of the three hour movie. It's an ambitious step to take - making lengthy, ensemble movies with tangentially related and occasionally interconnected storylines can be a risky en...

Maleficent might best be described as an alternate universe re-imagination of Sleeping Beauty. Taking a page from Wicked (the stage show that presents Oz from the witches' perspective), Linda Woolverton's screenplay presents an inverted version of ...

Even recognizing that it’s among the most unnecessary sequels ever made and that it exists purely because of how much money the original Mamma Mia made ($144M domestic, $610M worldwide), it’s difficult to hate Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again. I...

A Man Escaped is widely considered to be among French director Robert Bresson’s greatest achievements (if not his greatest achievement). Along with his other highly-regarded films, Pickpocket and The Trial of Joan of Arc, A Man Escaped emp...

There are times when A Man for All Seasons seems like an older, gentler uncle to George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones. (Martin was in part inspired by some of the more salacious and bloody episodes of English history, particularly during th...

The men in black at Columbia Pictures made the right decision when they elected not to screen Man of the House for critics. The film fails in so many ways that it's impossible to imagine it getting more than a handful of positive reviews; all but ...