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As their careers develop, many comedians yearn to cross over into serious dramatic roles, if only on occasion. This has happened with John Cleese, Steve Martin, Robin Williams, Tom Hanks, Jim Carrey, and Adam Sandler. Some are more successful than...

Everything, Everything, based on Nicola Yoon’s YA novel of the same name, asks the age-old question of which is more important: quality of life or quantity of life? The filmmakers have an undisguised preference for the former or, as Baz Luh...

It's tempting to look at the 2013 reincarnation of Evil Dead as yet another pointless remake of an '80s horror film. Haven't there been enough of these? One glance at the credit list reveals that both director Sam Raimi and star Bruce Campbell (o...

Sometimes an actor/character becomes so inextricably entwined with a franchise that moving in "a different direction" without them can be a difficult process. It's like that with Bruce Campbell's Ash and The Evil Dead. This is the seventh Evil Dea...

What do you get when you cross George Romero with The Three Stooges by way of the director of A Simple Plan and The Gift? Something offbeat, to be sure. Something grotesque, without a doubt. Something... groovy. Evil Dead II can be seen as ...

Evil Dead Rise, the fifth big-screen outing for Sam Raimi’s Deadites (they also had a three-season run on cable TV) tries to answer the question of whether The Evil Dead are strong enough on their own right to engage the viewer without the domin...

Long before Scream came along to simultaneously parody the horror genre while participating in it, there was Sam Raimi's Evil Dead trilogy (the third entry into the series, Army of Darkness, was released in 1993). Equal parts suspense, camp, comed...

As bold and dazzling a spectacle as Evita is, it's missing a soul. This brash, glitzy, energetic entertainment has the power to hold an audience enraptured, but, at the same time, there's a sense that what we're experiencing is just candy for ...

There's a prescription for making an effective dark comedy: the film must generate equal parts discomfort and laughter. The Ex offers plenty of the former but precious little of the latter. The movie is populated by dislikeable individuals doing ...

Paul Roland’s Exemplum opens with a definition (not a bad idea considering how obscure the term may be to all but classical literature scholars): “EXEMPLUM: 1. An example or model. 2. An anecdote that illustrates or supports a moral point, as ...