Reviews
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C+ |
**½ |
-2|
Adults
(Written by Jimmy Akin) From its opening minutes,
Two Weeks
Notice promises to be the story of how two mismatched,
lovable losers get together and fall in love.
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D- |
**½ |
-3|
Adults*
(Written by Robert Jackson) Narc is trying to be something. Really hard. It’s obvious. The question is: What is it trying to be?
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D+ |
*½ |
-2|
Adults*
The only thing that makes this particular film worth noting is the melancholy milestone it marks in the career of the man who was once Hollywood’s biggest star: It has now been a full decade since Harrison Ford took on a role worth caring about.
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F |
*½ |
-3|
Adults*
Martin Lawrence rants endlessly against the
White Man and Steve Zahn tries to endure him in the obnoxious
odd-couple action-comedy National Security (Columbia),
directed by Dennis Dugan.
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A+ |
**** |
+2|
Teens & Up*
Now, almost ten years later, Polanski has finally faced his
demons and made a film of almost ferocious objectivity — a film
devoid of even the smell of polemicism, sentimentality,
melodrama, or cliché. Not a celebration of the human
spirit, resisting both deceptive moral uplift and despairing
moral nihilism, neither demonizing the Germans nor lionizing the
Jews, The Pianist is a work of exquisite restraint. Any
misstep might have resulted in reducing the horror of genocide to
a prop in a morality-play, but Polanski surefootedly avoids every
trap and temptation in his path.
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C- |
** |
+1-2|
Adults
Theologically speaking, the question was absurd and
meaningless; but the answer, I think, contained profound insight.
God is both the source and the goal of our being, the meaning as
well as the master of our lives. Imagine reality without God, and
life becomes meaningless; imagine divine omnipotence at the
disposal of anything other than divine love, and existence
becomes infinite horror.
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D- |
*½ |
-3|
Adults*
John Q, which is sort of the moviegoing equivalent of
being taken hostage, was directed by Nick Cassavetes (She’s So
Lovely). Cassavetes — like the film’s hero, John Q. Archibald
(Washington) — has a child in need of a life-saving organ
transplant. I feel for the director, and for his hero. I cannot
condone the actions of either.
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C |
**½ |
-2|
Teens & Up*
Movie audiences reliably enjoy just about every ingredient involved in
Bend It Like Beckham, an East-meets-West comedy about an Indian family living in London’s Hounslow borough.
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C |
**½ |
-2|
Teens & Up*
Helena Bonham Carter is also convincingly simian as the
chimpanzee Ari, though less so than Thade, since she has to be
visibly feminine and potentially attractive to the human lead
(Mark Wahlberg). But the gorillas, like Attar (Michael Clarke
Duncan) and Krull (Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa), are as compellingly
realistic as Thade, if not quite as expressive.
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F |
*** |
-4|
Like the creators of
Dogma, I feel the
need to begin with a disclaimer of my own. This review is an
exercise in film criticism and commentary informed by Christian
faith. It is neither an anti-
Dogma activist polemic nor a
pro-
Dogma apologetical treatise. I come not to praise
Kevin Smith, nor to bury him, but to critique his work. I will
tell you what I think is good about it, and what I think is evil,
and why I think the work as a whole deserves its unacceptable
rating (not only from this site but also from the ). But this is a
complex film, and deserves careful evaluation. Those who are only
interested in one-sided spin, whether bad or good, will not find
it here.
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C+ |
**½ |
+0|
Kids & Up*
Not that I’ve anything against cats. But there’s a particular
breed of cat fancier who looks down at dogs precisely for
qualities like their obedience, loyalty, and desire to please,
explicitly preferring the fierce independence and proud
impassiveness associated with cats. I wonder whether this kind of
cat appreciation isn’t often rooted in a misguided human ideal — whether such people don’t prefer cats because they themselves
like the idea of being remote and independent.
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A- |
***½ |
+2|
Kids & Up*
Based on the children’s book
Freak The
Mighty, Peter Chelsom’s less oddly named
The Mighty
tells the story of a remarkable friendship between two young
boys, both outcasts. Max (Elden Ratliff) is dull-witted but
intimidating; Kevin (Kieran Culkin) is bright but crippled by
Morquio’s Syndrome.
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B- |
*** |
-1|
Adults
Like
Spinal Tap,
A Mighty Wind follows a number
of musicians who never actually existed, but often feel as if
they might have. There’s a convincing history to the Folksmen,
Mitch & Mickey, and the New Main Street Singers, developed by
Guest through a combination of pseudo-archival footage, interview
sequences, and period album covers that folk fans might almost
remember having seen in their collections.
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C+ |
**½ |
+0|
Teens & Up
Despite these similarities, What a Girl Wants differs
from The Princess Diaries in three important respects, all
of which are, as far as they go, good ideas.
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C+ |
**½ |
-1|
Kids & Up
Everyone knows going in that Hathaway’s frizzy hair,
horn-rimmed glasses, pratfalls, slouch, and puckered expressions
aren’t going to hold her back for long. (Indeed, it takes a
formidable effort to suspend one’s disbelief and accept that they
hold her back at all. Hathaway manages to be suitably awkward in
the medium shots, but every closeup blows the girl’s cover by
revealing her cover-girl beauty. Casting the gorgeous 20-year-old
"Get Real" actress as an 15-year-old ugly duckling is about as
plausible as Jennifer Lopez playing a wedding planner who can’t
get a date or Drew Barrymore playing a late bloomer who’s Never
Been Kissed.)
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C- |
**½ |
-2|
Teens & Up*
Welcome to our second annual Spring Frankie Muniz Morally Problematic
Spy Kids Rip-Off Movie, featuring hilarious hijinks offending each year against a different one of the Ten Commandments.
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C+ |
**½ |
-2|
Adults
He’s a wealthy, unattached scion of a
political dynasty; she’s a hard-working maid whose mother and
workplace "sisters" discourage her from yearning for more. An
updated "Cinderella" story in the Pretty Woman mold, Wayne
Wang’s Maid in Manhattan (Columbia) makes agreeably
diverting viewing for most of its 105-minute running time, though
after the magic runs out at midnight the movie meanders through
an autopilot resolution that lacks a glass slipper.
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C |
**½ |
+2-2|
Adults
Tears of the Sun (Columbia) presents a
picture of American military presence abroad that is
simultaneously appealing and troubling: superheroic Navy SEALs
going about doing good, rescuing refugees, battling evil
ethnic-cleansing rebels, and earning the gratitude and goodwill
of indigenous peoples, all in defiance of their orders and
American foreign policy.
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B |
*** |
+1-1|
Adults
This might seem an odd way to put it, but writer-director Brad Silberling’s
Moonlight Mile could be thought of as a kind of backwards mirror-image of writer-star Nia Vardalos’s indie hit,
My Big Fat Greek Wedding.
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C+ |
*** |
-2|
Adults*
If Greene is no longer interested in subjecting his
protagonist’s guilt to judgment, he’s not interested in
rationalizing it either. It’s simply a fact in a morally and
emotionally complex story of two very different but flawed
Westerners living in 1950s Vietnam in the last days of French
colonialism and the dawn of Vietnamese Communism.
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C |
** |
+1|
Kids & Up
The voices are different, but the story is the same.
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C+ |
**½ |
-2|
Adults*
Ultimately,
Daredevil works best as a triumph of screenwriting redaction and well-utilized effects over weak characterization and generally uninspired casting. As super-hero movies go, I rank it below
Spider-Man, but above any of the films in the
Batman franchise.
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D+ |
*½ |
-2|
Adults
Now, the top of the Empire State Building is a lofty
destination, an end in itself. By contrast, a bridge is only for
going from one place and another. Like all of New York’s major
river crossings, the Manhattan Bridge is undeniably a marvel of
modern engineering; but for romance and evocative appeal, the
Empire State Building surely has the edge by a considerable
margin.
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C |
*** |
-2|
Adults*
(Co-written with Emily Snyder) Like
Moulin Rouge!,
Chicago involves sordid
goings-on in a rather seamy milieu; but where the earlier film
tried to contrast its dissolute ambiance with heart-warming
sincerity and idealism,
Chicago is cynical to the
core.
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B |
*** |
+1-2|
Adults
Then, after three days of rehearsals, I thought it would be
fun to actually graduate.
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B+ |
*** |
+1|
Kids & Up*
The lion’s share of the credit for
Ice Age goes to the sloth.
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B- |
*** |
-2|
Adults
Of course we don’t really know a whole lot about the CIA, but
The Recruit has fun guessing. Directed by Roger Donaldson,
who’s helmed the superior thrillers No Way Out (1987) and
Thirteen Days as well as action schlock like
Species and Dante’s Peak, The Recruit takes
us into the Farm, thought to be the name of the CIA’s top-secret
training facility, as well as the agency’s Langley, VA
headquarters.
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D- |
* |
-3|
Teens & Up*
Though, what with jokes alluding to homosexuality and
masturbation, a sequence with a man and a woman in their
underthings bathing together and smooching under a waterfall
(which one describes as "the most sensual, romantic moment of my
entire life"), some fairly rough mobster violence, and odd talk
about "testicles falling off" and "crazy-ass white boys," it’s
not exactly family fare.
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F |
***½ |
-4|
Still others face demons of a yet more personal and internal
sort — addiction, self-destructive behavior, disordered
appetites. And then there are those unhappy individuals who seem
to carry suffering itself within their very psyche — those with
clinical depression and other forms of mental illness.
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F |
* |
-3|
Adults*
Segal and Rule play convicts sent to Alcatraz by an FBI agent (Claudia Christian) following a chop-shop raid. For no plot-related reason at all, Segal is caught in crossfire during the raid and flatlines for what we are later told is 22 minutes, though it seems mere seconds at the time.
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