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As a snapshot of the U.S. cultural scene during the late 1960s and early 1970s, The U.S. Versus John Lennon is a success. As an opportunity to hear some of Lennon's solo songs within a political context, the movie works. Unfortunately, as a piece...

Hollywood, it seems, has lost the knack of how to make a good romantic comedy. The best two such films of 2009, Adventureland and (500) Days of Summer, have come down the indie trail. The major studios are unwilling to fund any production that do...

Kudos to Sony for not holding advance screenings of Ultraviolet. This is the kind of crap you want to keep away from critics. Masochist that I am, I went to see this on my own dime, and regret every cent spent to gain admission to the theater. T...

The “hook” intended to lure in viewers to Tom Gormican’s The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent is the marquee-topping selection of Nicolas Cage as “Nick Cage.” The film gets a lot of mileage (perhaps too much) out of this meta casting....

For a while, The Unborn unfolds like a nice little PG-13 horror film should: a dash of atmosphere, a heroine who spends lots of time in her underwear, a general sense of enhanced creepiness, and an effective "boo!" moment or two. Then it commits a...

Angelina Jolie's sophomore effort as a director is a high-profile adaptation the true-life book Unbroken (written by Laura Hillenbrand, the author of Sea Biscuit). Those unaware that the film is based on historical events might understandably ass...

Tell me if you’ve heard this refrain before: The experience of playing a game is more rewarding than watching a movie adaptation. Sadly, this applies as much to Uncharted as to nearly every previous game-to-movie translation. Even Uncharted, tou...

In their follow-up to the underrated Good Time, the Safdie Brothers (Benny and Josh) have shown that the some of the most forceful qualities evident in their previous film were more trademarks than one-off experiments. Uncut Gems, although ver...

It would be easy to get hung up on the illegal immigration issue when discussing Under the Same Moon. Indeed, the filmmakers don't make a secret of their feelings about it; they believe the current policy to be repressive and biased. However, the...

A naked woman wearing an owl mask. Sex orgies in buried tombs. Skinny-dipping shoot-outs. A serial killer of dogs. A topless woman with a talkative parrot. A girl with a balloon fetish. An aggressive skunk. Enough conspiracies and secret codes...