Search for Ward

Spoilers – sort of: Although this is not a spoiler-heavy review, there are implied spoilers. While specifics are not revealed, anyone good at reading between lines may learn more about the movie than they want to. Those in search of a "virgin" ...

History has labeled Susan Seidelman’s Desperately Seeking Susan as “a Madonna film” but a more accurate descriptor might be “a Rosanna Arquette film.” Indeed, at the time Seidelman was casting the film, Madonna was a footnote in the musi...

In July 1967, civil unrest resulting from the brutality of the predominantly white Detroit police department reached a boiling point. The result, which history has named the “12th Street Riot”, was one of the deadliest and destructive riots in...

Taylor Hackford's The Devil's Advocate has many laudable qualities, but subtlety is not among them. The story, which postulates that the devil is walking among us today, gives Satan's human alter-ego a truly obvious name: John Milton (for those w...

Ron Howard is unquestionably an A-list director, and his credentials are impeccable. When a filmmaker of Howard's status has a movie tossed into theaters during garbage time (January/February or August), it results in raised eyebrows and generates ...

While watching Disney's Dinosaur, with all of its incredibly rendered creatures and seamless blending of animated objects with real backgrounds, a question occurred to me: In movies like this, can the writing keep pace with the technology? Films ...

More than 30 years after its initial release, The Dirty Dozen remains one of the most popular war films ever to grace the silver screen - a reputation that not even three bad made-for-TV sequels in the late '80s could tarnish. A quintessential "gu...

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...

In the early summer sweepstakes, Warner Brothers has weighed in with Twister, Paramount with Mission Impossible, and now Universal with Dragonheart, director Rob Cohen's swords-and-sorcery saga. No prizes for guessing which is most likely to be th...

When it comes to spy thrillers, Tony Gilroy knows the game. The formula for a crackling entry into this genre is simple enough: keep the action moving and the twists coming, then engage in one late innings sleight of hand that pulls the rug out fr...