Movies starring John Cusack
About the kindest thing that can be said about Better Off Dead is that it’s a product of its time. Seen today, the movie is painfully dated and littered with unfunny material and broad “acting” that was somehow thought to be amusing. Yet,...
A mysterious, gun-toting stranger wanders the woods. Three twenty-somethings head out for some time away from society, looking forward to a vacation of camping and riding the rapids. Of course, their paths are going to cross. Of course, there ...
The title may make it sound like a horror film but The Bag Man is actually a neo-noir thriller. The movie is relentlessly dark with the majority of it transpiring in and around a seedy motel at night. Despite the participation of a couple of well-kno...
Whatever else it may be cited for, The Paperboy, Lee Daniels' follow-up to Precious, is not going be called "the feel-good movie of 2012." An unsettling period piece mystery (the period being the late 1960s), The Paperboy is steeped in the so-calle...
If Sherlock Holmes can be a yesteryear James Bond and Abraham Lincoln can be a vampire slayer, then who's to say that Edgar Allan Poe can't be the world's most literate consulting detective? With a script co-written by Shakespeare (Hannah, that is)...
In the case of Hot Tub Time Machine, the title is arguably more inventive than the movie. An attempt to flavor The Hangover with a little Back to the Future, this film argues that what happens in the '80s stays in the '80s, but does so with middli...
If, as is believed in certain fringe circles, the world will come to an end in 2012, at least there will be no more movies like this one made. Perhaps the strangest thing about 2012 is that the bad parts of the film are among the most enjoyable, b...
When The Sure Thing was released in 1985, it was out of step with the times. Teen comedies in those years were saturated with sex and broad humor. Romance and realism (even to a modest degree) were undesirable relics of a bygone era. Nevertheles...
Finally, there's a legitimate challenge to Disney. And, while it's unlikely that Twentieth Century Fox's Anastasia will break the Mouse's stranglehold on animated films, it's a good place to start. Anastasia is easily the best non-Disney anim...
These days, critics (and non-critics, for that matter) are fond of complaining about how multiplexes are populated by cookie-cutter motion pictures that follow safe, formula-derived patterns designed to please audiences who want a different version...
