They Were Expendable (1945)

Let’s stipulate that teenage sexual energy and the sorts of things it drives the young’uns to get up to are inherently funny subjects. Shakespeare has the grumbling old shepherd in The Winter’s Tale say: “I would there were no age between ten and three-and-twenty, or that youth would sleep out the rest; for there is…

Poor Deputy Marshal Sam Gerard! The only fugitives he ever gets to chase are Houdini-like in their ability to wriggle out of certain capture and who thus put him through a hell of frustration over and over (and over and over) again. . .and then they turn out to be innocent! Oops! Hope I didn’t…

A bizarre movie that looks like a vanity project for Robin Wright Penn, who gets to chew the scenery as a dangerously unbalanced but utterly implausible woman

Religious wildcatters and spiritual entrepreneurs have long been a part of the American story. It was only a matter of time before someone brought the Holocaust into the show

Hilary Swank should never have left Nebraska — especially not for 18^th century France.

A lamentably bad Christmas movie with no more understanding of the traditions and beliefs it exploits than the ninnies it portrays