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Emerging from its Cannes debut, Elemental has received mixed reviews. The reason for the lack of enthusiasm seems to be related to expectations by some critics that the film doesn’t take a more aggressive stance in the culture wars. There’s a ...

I’ve long since given up asking the question “Why?” when it comes to filmmakers turning to foreign language films for the storylines of new English-language films. Sometimes, in fact, the results can be quite satisfactory – take the 2022 r...

The biggest thing The Little Things has going for it is that it’s not a run-of-the-mill mystery/thriller. The most significant potential problem, especially with respect to mainstream acceptance, is the ambiguity of the resolution. Some view...

How to describe Steven Soderbergh’s Let Them All Talk? The second major movie in 25 years set almost entirely aboard an ocean liner making transatlantic crossing? An Agatha Christie mystery without the mystery? An opportunity to remember how...

When it comes to 20th century wars, World War I, the so-called “Great War” or “War to End All Wars,” is poorly represented in motion pictures. With the exception of All Quiet on the Western Front, stand-outs about the first conflict of...

Tolkien represents a classic standard-order biopic – a high-level profile of someone with minimal flesh on the bones. More like the dramatization of an Encyclopedia Britannica entry than a fully rendered movie, Tolkien provides details about ...

It has taken Hollywood more than fifty years to produce a rebuttal to Arthur Penn’s classic Bonnie and Clyde. In the romanticized 1967 gangster film, law enforcement in general and Frank Hamer in particular were portrayed as bumbling up until...

Over the years, war films have come into and gone out of vogue. At one point, they were mostly about heroism and valor on the battlefield but that changed with 1946’s The Best Years of Our Lives, William Wyler’s story about how winning the ...

Victoria and Abdul, based on (mostly) true events as related in Shrabani Basu’s historical chronicle of the same name, is effectively a sequel to the 1997 film, Mrs. Brown. That movie, directed by John Madden, detailed Queen Victoria’s fri...

Passengers is an art-house science fiction movie that somehow got made by a major studio with A-list stars. The film owes more to castaway stories than traditional spacefaring tales and, at least during the first half, it’s ripe with existentia...