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Consider Cinderella Man to be a Depression era Rocky. While that may at first seem like a glib way to describe Ron Howard's rags-to-riches boxing drama, a careful examination of the storyline reveals numerous similarities between this drama and Sy...

The main problem with Coach Carter can be summed up simply: too much sermonizing. In a way, it's hard to fault the film, because its heart is in the right place. The movie wants to impress upon teenagers that education is the first step on the pa...

Colette, a U.S./U.K. collaborative bio-pic from director Wash Westmoreland (The Fluffer), presents a chronology of the celebrated French author during her Belle Epoque formative years. Transpiring across a span of nearly 20 years, the movie fa...

The popularity of Conan the Barbarian peaked during the early 1980s, with no fewer than three monthly comic books to go along with the books and the first Arnold Schwarzenegger movie. The success of the 1982 film begot a horrible sequel, Conan the...

Crazy Heart is the country music version of The Wrestler: a grizzled veteran whose days in the spotlight are behind him struggles to keep going while seeing the world through a haze of regret and booze. The story is unremarkable; the alcoholic com...

When it comes to a Spike Lee movie, it would be foolish to expect a politics-free zone. Lee is an activist filmmaker and has never pretended otherwise. He makes movies that entertain and educate but, most importantly, he seeks to challenge. So...

The Dark Tower has been called Stephen King’s magnum opus for a good reason. Spanning eight novels and needing well over one million words, the saga took more than 30 years to craft (the first volume was published in 1982 and the most recent...

Watching The Debt, I was reminded of how entertaining a well-executed Cold War thriller can be. Although elements of this movie, based on the 2007 Israeli film Ha-Hov, have a kinship to Steven Spielberg's Munich, the overall thrust is more in line ...

Don Jon is about addiction, obsession, and compulsion. It's about how the elements that drive and define our lives can impede normal, productive behavior. And, unlike a dark film like Shame, which deals with the same subject, it attacks its thesis ...

When I first heard that Twentieth Century Fox intended to re-make Dr. Dolittle with Eddie Murphy in the title role, I suspected that it was a bad move (the success of The Nutty Professor notwithstanding). Now that I have endured the 85 minute moti...