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Reckless is a Christmas story for all of us who like our holiday fare spiced with bizarre characters and strange plot twists. This black comedy, directed by Norman Rene (Longtime Companion, Prelude to a Kiss) and written by his frequent colla...

Most directors, upon entering a genre with which they lack familiarity, adhere strictly to "the book." David Mamet, however, throws "the book" out the window. The resulting movie, a mixed martial arts concoction called Redbelt, is different than ...

Memo to director Chris Columbus: In most cases, it's a bad idea for a movie to be a direct representation of a play. "Opening up" the setting is sometimes not all that's necessary to make a stage production into something cinematic. In a theater...

With its curious fusion of tear-jerking drama and fish-out-of-water humor, Rental Family is indeed a strange brew—one of those films that sounds slightly ridiculous in synopsis but blossoms into something unexpectedly tender when experienced mom...

Even after nine years, you can't keep a good man down. The indomitable protagonist of 2000's surprisingly engaging Pitch Black and 2004's disappointing The Chronicles of Riddick is back for his third go-around and, if the open-endedness of the narr...

Spoilers ahoy! A 19-year old woman (Brie Larson) is abducted, held against her will, and repeatedly raped. After two years in captivity, she gives birth to a boy. The father (Sean Bridgers) allows her to keep the child, whom she raises. By the tim...

The memory is not to be trusted, at least insofar as movie evaluation is concerned. When I first saw The Running Man in theaters more than 30 years ago, I believed it to be firmly rooted in the “dumb entertainment” category where many of t...

This is the third time Stephen King’s bestselling vampire novel, Salem’s Lot, has been adapted for a visual medium. The first two, one in 1979 and the other in 2004, were both mini-series with running lengths of slightly over three hours. In o...

The Savages is being described in some corners as a "dark comedy," but such a designation does a great disservice to Tamara Jenkins' picture. This is not a comedy but a drama. To the extent that there is humor, it emerges from the uncomfortable s...

School for Scoundrels feels like a wasted opportunity. This is a case of a motion picture failing to unlock the promise of a ripe potential. As black comedies go, this one is too tepid to hit any mark by which a movie is deemed successful. The d...