What happens if you let Joseph Kosinski (Tron: Legacy) mix and match elements of I Am Legend and Wall-E with The Matrix with Tom Cruise as the last man left to clean up the mess on Earth after an   

Historic sports-based biopics always run the risk of sentimentality, especially with a figure like Jackie Robinson. Too often the desire is to show the courage of the subject in the face of hatred  

Japanese animator Goro Miyazaki (Tales from Earthsea), likely unknown to audiences here in the States, gets a push for From Up On Poppy Hill (thanks to executive producers Kathleen Kennedy and Frank  

So often, documentaries about people and communities that live outside the modern social framework present these factions as curiosities, maintaining a knowing distance tinged with judgment. With   

Critical analysis involves cutting through the clutter and noise, which can sometimes be quite difficult. For example, I caught The Place Beyond the Pines at the Toronto International Film Festival   

The premise of Australian director Wayne Blair’s period musical drama, The Sapphires, reads like a Down Under version of Dreamgirls but with a healthy dose of humor to appease the mainstreamers ou  

Once again, audiences find themselves face-to-face with the banality of modern parody, in the form of yet another take on paranormal evil. The Scary Movie franchise, based initially on characters   

High-end art auctioneer Simon (James McAvoy) cues us in to the ins and outs of the security necessary to protect near-priceless works of art from the would-be thugs out there with enough “muscle and nerve” to dare to burst into an auction house and steal a painting.  

 Positively Cleveland offered me the chance to experience the Indie Cleveland vibe (based around the opening weekend of the 37th annual Cleveland International Film Festival), so I signed on for the press tour, but I was skeptical. Would it cramp my style, force me into a box of pre-packaged highlights with little of my own vaunted trial and error?    

What can I say about a man I never met, but who had been part of my life for decades? I, seemingly like a whole generation of film fans, watched Siskel and Ebert back in the 1980s, and then graduated to reading his reviews in the Chicago Sun-Times during my college years. Every Friday morning, I made my sojourn to the Annenberg School of Communications  library and collected the Sun-Times, th...