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There's a fine line between coincidence and contrivance, and what characterizes that demarcation has more to do with enjoyability than believability. Red Rock West, a film consigned to cable and video until a Bay Area theater decided to give it a s...

The Revenant, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s follow-up to his Oscar-winning Birdman, plays like a cross between Terrence Malick and Sam Peckinpah. As unlikely as such a conflation might seem, the result works - sometimes to stunning effect. In a...

Most Civil War films - and there have been quite a few over the years - have a tendency to skew their perspective towards the Northern viewpoint. It's not hard to understand why - the old South may have been North America's final refuge for a gent...

Rio Bravo, the acclaimed 1959 Howard Hawks Western, showcases a perfectly-cast John Wayne in the kind of role he defined during his four-plus decades of appearing before the camera. Although aspects of the movie have a dated feel when viewed l...

Note: I consider this review to be “spoiler-lite.” Although there are no overt revelations of things that can’t be learned by scanning published cast lists or watching the trailer, if you don’t want to know anything about the movie, co...

It's so easy to go wrong with a film like this. So easy to tart it up with sentiment, to turn up the mawkishness to an "11." For an example of how badly wrong this sort of thing can go, just think Patch Adams, where the manipulation never stopped c...