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One of the reasons why The Naked Gun works as well as it does is that the series has been allowed a 32-year rest since the release of the wretched Naked Gun 33 1/3. That's a long enough pause for audiences to forget what went sour with the...

Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey is a three-hour refutation of James Cameron's fallacious assertion that 3-D is necessary for complete cinematic immersion. On even a conventional screen, Nolan's reworking of Homer's epic tale towers over the audien...

The Roses is not a remake of the 1989 film The War of the Roses, which starred Michael Douglas, Kathleen Turner, and Danny DeVito (and was directed by DeVito), although both movies draw from the same source material: Warren Adler’s novel. Di...

First thing’s first: this is not a remake of the 1987 film of the same name starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. The two are connected only insofar as each claims to be an adaptation of the 1982 Stephen King novel. In the case of the first movie, simi...

The Smashing Machine is one of those biopics that falls into the trap of trying to do too much within a limited span of time. The tapestry woven by writer/director Benny Safdie is so dense that he might have had a better chance of realizing his vi...

A period piece thriller set during the Great Depression, The Weight echoes aspects of the classic The Wages of Fear without being a copy and suffers only from the occasional too-obvious contrivance used to increase suspense. Director Padraic McKin...

For the most part, Netflix has two modes of films: high-profile prestige projects and “lesser” titles that use recognizable stars to lure bigger audiences. The Woman in Cabin 10 fits snugly into the latter category. For lack of a better descri...

This is the sort of movie that gives “chick flicks” a bad name. It’s a cross between inept melodrama and a bad sit-com. The “comedy” (for lack of a better word) is obvious, poorly timed, and not especially funny. The “drama” (again, f...

The best things about Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood are not elements that will build large audiences. This is a film about character development/disintegration and a comprehensive look at the early days of the oil industry. The more ...

The Farrelly Brothers' first two films, Dumb and Dumber and Kingpin, were outrageous, uncouth, bawdy, and unapologetically lowbrow. Their third film, There's Something about Mary, is all of those things and one more: hilarious. I rarely chuckl...