John J. Puccio

When Quentin Tarantino made “Kill Bill,” it was said he based his story on every old Hong Kong martial-arts movie he could lay his eyes on. If so, then 1982’s “Duel to the Death” must have been one of the…

“Ninety per cent of cops go through their entire career without ever firing their gun.” –Michael Madsen, “44 Minutes” And then there are those few times when they do draw their weapons, and it’s frightening as hell. On Friday, February…

The knocks against this offbeat dramatic romance are easy to see. Some people will find it overly sentimental, melodramatic, and pretentious. Its situations will seem exaggerated, its dialogue insipid, and its characterizations more shallow than its filmmakers would lead us…

Despite the fact that you are going to hear a good deal of negative criticism from me about this film in the next few minutes, and despite my lack of any serious regard for its credibility, let me begin by…

It’s safe to say that “Alien Quadrilogy” at a whopping nine discs is one of the biggest sets of DVDs ever devoted to a specific series of theatrical releases. The package includes regular and special editions of each of the…

Pixar Studios, using 3-D computer graphics, have had an amazing succession of animated hits in the last few years with “Toy Story,” “A Bug’s Life,” “Toy Story 2,” “Monster’s Inc.,” and 2003’s “Finding Nemo.” It seems that every time they…

“City of Ghosts,” the 2003 dramatic thriller from star, cowriter, and first-time director Matt Dillon was a huge, huge box-office bomb. It looks to have been seen by more film critics than regular moviegoers, and very few of them, critics…

It’s good to see the Hollywood musical finally rising from the dead, where the genre lay moribund for close to thirty years until the advent of “Moulin Rouge” in 2001. It’s ironic, though, that one of the musicals to bring…

This is a mood movie. Not the movie’s mood. Your mood while you’re watching it. If you’ve got the itch for a syrupy, sentimental, blatantly manipulative film experience, then “Curly Sue” is just your ticket. And who isn’t ready for…

In Italian writer Carlo Collodi’s 1882 fairy tale, Pinocchio is a puppet, a wooden marionette in the form of a child. In Roberto Benigni’s 2002 remake of the tale in which Benigni stars as the puppet, he is neither wooden…