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Al Pacino in a Mafia movie feels as natural as peanut butter with jelly. Mike Newell, the director of such popular British comedies as Enchanted April and Four Weddings and a Funeral, is another matter altogether. When you think of a director...

Donnie Darko, the debut feature from writer/director Richard Kelly, is part psychological thriller and part science fiction mystery. The title character (Jake Gyllenhaal), a teenager in his last year of high school, is suffering from all manner of ...

(Insert appropriate remarks about how Doom is the perfect name for this motion picture.) Although I am not averse to wasting a few hours playing computer games, I have never tried my hand at Doom. Judging by sales figures and testimonials, play...

As a character study that examines a pair of reprehensible individuals, The Door in the Floor does an excellent job. The problem with the film is simple: how many people want to spend nearly two hours in the company of such characters. The viewe...

Dope, an unconventional coming-of-age story from writer/director Rick Famuyiwa (Our Family Wedding), posits the unlikely proposition of a straight-A student with nearly perfect SAT scores who builds a mini-drug empire as a stepping stone to get into ...

Spoilers! (Not sure if such a warning is needed – the movie is 75 years old.)In concert with 1941’s The Maltese Falcon, Double Indemnity was at the forefront of a stylistic innovation that would become known as “film noir.” Directors J...

Towards the end of Double Jeopardy, one individual threatens another, "I'm gonna have you arrested for stupidity." I wish someone had made a similar pronouncement to director Bruce Beresford and writers David Weisberg & Douglas Cook. In most case...

It's one of life's bitter ironies that one of the first things lost to moral certainty is the capacity for compassion. Righteousness is a cold, hard position, and an unshakeable one. It allows no room for one of the most basic tenants of human exi...

For a movie about small people, Downsizing certainly thinks big…too big, perhaps. Director/co-writer Alexander Payne has done such a good job of world-building that there are far too many ideas, subplots, and opportunities for one two-hour f...

The term “fan service” is often used in association with popular genre projects: Marvel films, Star Trek, Star Wars, and the like. The two Downton Abbey films (the first, released in 2019, and its sequel, A New Era) illustrate that even Ma...