-
A+ |
**** |
+4|
Teens & Up*
The Ninth Day digs beyond rote charges of ecclesiastical complicity and counter-arguments to explore various levels of resistance and protest — and their consequences.
Read more >
-
A+ |
**** |
+2|
Kids & Up*
The Incredibles is exhilarating
entertainment with unexpected depths. It’s a bold, bright, funny
and furious superhero cartoon that dares to take sly jabs at the
culture of entitlement, from the shallow doctrine of self-esteem
that affirms everybody, encouraging mediocrity and penalizing
excellence, to the litigation culture that demands recompense for
everyone if anything ever happens, to the detriment of the
genuinely needy.
Read more >
-
A+ |
**** |
+3|
Adults*
As he first did decades earlier with Jaws, Spielberg
reaches past our defenses by suggesting rather than showing: he
knows there is as much horror in a mountain of shoes and personal
effects whose owners won’t be needing them again as in a mountain
of bodies. In fact, one of the film’s most ghastly moments is
nothing more than a mere rude gesture from a small child.
Read more >
-
A+ |
**** |
+4|
Kids & Up*
Witness the astonishing
animation of scale at work in capturing the towering monuments of
Egypt, or the host of departing Hebrews: few if any traditional
animated films have ever captured the sheer sense of size
in this film. Watch the subtle storytelling in an early scene as
the infant Moses, caught up in the Queen’s arms, eclipses the
toddler Ramses in her line of vision, leaving him standing there
with outstretched arms; foreshadowing the rivalry and ultimately
the enmity between the heir to the throne and his Hebrew foster
brother. Notice the small details in those quiet numinous
moments: the pebbles rolling back at Moses’ feet at the burning
bush; the halo of clear water around his ankles as the Nile turns
to blood; the horror of an Egyptian servant as the surface of the
water bubbles and the first frogs begin to flop out of the river
onto the palace stairs; an extinguished candle flame or an
offscreen sound of a jar crashing as the destroying angel swirls
in and out among the Egyptians.
Read more >
-
A+ |
**** |
+4|
Kids & Up*
In The Miracle Maker, the film’s makers have a small miracle of their own: a simple, modest retelling of the gospel story of the ministry and passion of Christ that does little more than present the bare events of the gospel narratives, without adornment or invention, without idiosyncratic "explanations" or editorial spin, without elaborations for the sake of amusement or excitement.
Read more >
-
A+ |
**** |
+2|
Kids & Up
The judges rating the pig’s performance might as well be grading the entire movie. Babe is a perfect 10.
Read more >
-
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.
Read more >
-
A+ |
**** |
+4|
Kids & Up
Ultimately, Into Great Silence reveals itself to be about nothing less than the presence of God. So many spiritually aware films — The Seventh Seal, Crimes and Misdemeanors — are about God’s absence or silence. Here is a film that dares to explore the possibility of finding God, of a God who is there for those who seek him with their whole hearts.
Read more >
-
A+ |
**** |
+3|
Teens & Up
It’s hard to overstate the soaring achievement
of Peter Jackson and company in The Return of the King,
the third and final chapter of their historic adaptation of
The Lord of the Rings. To call it the grandest spectacle
ever filmed is no exaggeration; it may also be the most
satisfying third act of any film trilogy, completing what can now
be regarded as possibly the best realized cinematic trilogy of
all time.
Read more >
-
A+ |
**** |
+2|
Kids & Up
It’s the best kind of sequel, the kind that neither repeats the original nor merely adds to it, but lovingly builds upon it and goes beyond it into narrative and emotional territory no first film could reach.
Read more >
-
A+ |
**** |
+4|
Kids & Up
Without context or explanation,
Lukaszewicz plunges the viewer into Faustina’s world, confronting
us with with an early experience from Faustina’s childhood,
challenging us to take this story on its own terms. It’s a
surprisingly powerful approach, as transcendent in its own way as
the restraint of Bresson or Dreyer.
Read more >
-
A+ |
**** |
+3|
Teens & Up
There can be no more fitting tribute to Peter Jackson’s The Fellowship of the Ring than to apply to it the words with which C. S. Lewis acclaimed the original book when Tolkien first wrote it: “Here are beauties that pierce like swords or burn like cold iron; here is a [film] that will break your heart.”
Read more >
-
A+ |
**** |
+4|
Teens & Up*
A tightly wound, middle-aged carpenter named Olivier (Olivier
Gourmet) works with young boys at some sort of center. His inner
life, his motives and emotions, aren’t revealed to us, and he
doesn’t seem preoccupied with them himself. He wears a leather
back brace, and has perhaps been injured at some point; and his
work itself may be a similar sort of prop against some injury of
his past.
Read more >
-
A+ |
**** |
+4|
Kids & Up
In the end, Babette’s Feast is a quiet celebration of
the divine grace that meets us at every turn, and even redeems
our ways not taken, our sacrifices and losses. Whatever we think
has been given up or lost, God gives back in greater abundance,
one way or another. It may not be till heaven that we truly
become all that he intends; but his grace is here and now,
whatever our circumstances, and with him all things are possible.
Read more >
-
A+ |
**** |
+4|
Teens & Up
As I contemplate Mel Gibson’s The Passion
of the Christ, the sequence I keep coming back to, again and
again, is the scourging at the pillar.
Read more >
-
A+ |
**** |
+4|
Teens & Up
Sophie Scholl is one of a very few films that accomplishes one of the rarest and most valuable of cinematic achievements: It makes heroic goodness not just admirable, but attractive and interesting.
Read more >
-
A+ |
**** |
+2-1|
Teens & Up*
So deeply does The Dark Knight delve into the darkness that lurks in the hearts of men that it comes almost as a shock, bordering on euphoria, to find that it maintains a tenacious grip onto hope in the human potential for good.
Read more >
-
A |
**** |
+1-1|
Teens & Up
It’s tempting to call Batman Begins the
Citizen Kane of super-hero
movies; at any rate, it’s the closest thing so far.
Read more >
-
A |
**** |
+3|
Adults
The Decalogue, Kieslowski’s
extraordinary, challenging collection of ten one-hour films made
for Polish television in the dying days of the Soviet Union,
doesn’t answer those questions either. What it does is pose them
as hauntingly and seriously as any cinematic effort in the last
twenty years.
Read more >
-
A |
**** |
+1|
Adults
Spielberg has always known how to manipulate an audience’s
emotions, a knack he makes effective use of here. Humor
alternates with squirming discomfort and emotional release as the
director pokes fun of Cruise’s sex-symbol status in a couple of
funny incidents, then leaves us wincing with a number of scenes
involving eyeballs, or a character fumbling blindly for the one
edible sandwich in a squalid refrigerator.
Read more >
-
A |
**** |
+3|
Teens & Up*
Contriving to hide the boy from camp
officials (who soon put the other children to death), Guido tells
Giosue that the concentration camp is actually an elaborate
role-playing game in which the "players" are competing for points in the
hopes of winning a real battle tank. From then on, Guido will
take any risk, court any danger, to maintain his son’s illusion
that none of it is real.
Read more >
-
A |
**** |
+1|
Teens & Up
This is what a Spider-Man movie should be — freewheeling, rip-roaring, hilarious, heartfelt, over the top. Spider-Man 2 just might be the single greatest super-hero movie ever; it is unquestionably the wildest, most joyous, flat-out comic-bookiest comic-book movie of all time.
Read more >
-
A |
**** |
+0|
Adults
The story is said to be set in 19th-century China, but its
roots are older, reaching for a mythic age of larger-than-life
heroes and superhuman derring-do. Heroes with paranormal
abilities were also a theme of the recent Unbreakable; but Crouching
Tiger, Hidden Dragon has what was lacking in Unbreakable: a sense of wonder, of
exhilaration, of mystery and beauty and hope.
Read more >
-
A |
**** |
+2|
Kids & Up*
Pixar’s fifth computer-animated film is another gem, a deeply affecting, stunningly animated father-son fish story that that not only features the first onscreen Pixar dad, but actually focuses on the parent-child relationship rather than seeing the child in relation to some surrogate adult-figure such as Toy Story’s Woody and Buzz or Monsters, Inc.’s Mike and Sully.
Read more >
-
A |
**** |
+2|
Teens & Up
Seibei hardly cuts a dashing figure; even his weapon of
choice, the short sword, provokes contempt rather than respect.
But his duties these days call for clerical work rather than
swordplay — until his best friend Iinuma (Mitsuru Fukikoshi) is
threatened by a former brother-in-law, the ex-husband of Iinuma’s
beautiful sister Tomoe (Rie Miyazawa), whom Seibei’s known since
childhood.
Read more >
-
A |
**** |
+2|
Teens & Up*
Like a cannon blast across the bows, Peter
Weir’s Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World is
a thunderous, almost defiant declaration heralding the arrival of
a force to be reckoned with.
Read more >
-
A |
**** |
+3|
Kids & Up
We hear a few anecdotes about Alvin’s life, but nothing meant to make us say, "Aha — so that’s why…" The only "explanation" comes in the very last moments of the film, when we finally see for ourselves the point of Alvin’s determination to make the journey his own way; why he couldn’t accept a kind stranger’s offer to drive him the rest of the way.
Read more >
-
A |
**** |
+3|
Adults*
Tim Robbins argues his point fearlessly, not taking the easy
way out, not stacking the deck by emotionally manipulating the
audience, but instead taking a worst-case scenario: Rather than
giving us a murderer who isn’t really so bad, merely
misunderstood and mistreated and so forth, Robbins gives us a
thoroughly revolting individual, one who spouts racist propaganda
not because he believes it but simply because it is shocking and
antisocial and hateful; who tries to humiliate the one person
interested in his welfare with leering come-ons aimed at her
consecrated chastity.
Read more >
-
A |
**** |
+2|
Kids & Up
Toy Story, the first-ever fully computer-animated feature and the film that put Pixar Studios on the map, is more than a technical tour de force. It’s moviemaking alchemy — a breathtakingly perfect blend of wide-eyed childhood wonder and wry adult humor, yesteryear nostalgia and eye-popping novelty, rollicking storytelling and touchingly honest emotion.
Read more >
-
A |
**** |
+1-1|
Teens & Up
By the time the credits
roll, we’ve had a whirlwind tour of virtually everything you can
do in a Western. There are shootouts, standoffs, ambushes, jail breaks, posse
pursuits, wagon convoys, saloon gunfights, outlaw hideouts,
family feuds, wounded heroes, bucket-line firefighting, a cattle
stampede, and much more.
Read more >
-
A |
**** |
+1|
Teens & Up
A haunting, harrowing war movie, an emotionally devastating character study, and an extraordinarily restrained example of animé or Japanese animation, Grave of the Fireflies is a unique and unforgettable masterpiece.
Read more >
-
A |
**** |
+0|
Kids & Up
What Winged Migration did for birds and Atlantis did for life under the
sea, Microcosmos does for the insect world. It’s an
astonishingly up-close and personal look at an infinitesimal
world as alien as anything captured by the Hubble telescope or
the Mars rovers — but also a world of strange fascination and
unexpected beauty.
Read more >
-
A |
**** |
+2|
Kids & Up
A loosely structured coming-of-age story, Kiki’s Delivery Service features one of Miyazaki’s most personable protagonists, a delightful cast of supporting characters, and a rambling, episodic storyline full of charming incident and irresistible imagery.
Read more >
-
A |
**** |
+0|
Teens & Up
In an age when we rely on computerized directions and GPS devices to drive to the next town, it seems an almost mythic scenario: brilliant men calculating outer-space trajectories on the fly with pencils and slide rules, keeping life and limb together literally with duct tape, flying to the moon and back simply because they could.
Read more >
-
A |
**** |
+3|
Teens & Up*
Whatever monument is eventually built at Ground Zero or anywhere else, United 93 is as fitting and worthy a memorial to the victims and heroes of September 11 as one could hope for.
Read more >
-
A |
**** |
+2|
Kids & Up
Man’s own shadow, as much as the moon’s, lies across In the Shadow of the Moon, David Sington’s moving documentary of the U.S. Apollo program. An eloquent testament to the grandeur of creation as well as man’s unique place in it, In the Shadow of the Moon offers a remarkable look at the history and technology of the Apollo program, but an even more extraordinary glimpse of the men who lived it and made it happen.
Read more >
-
A |
**** |
+1|
Kids & Up
Even Pixar has never attempted anything on a canvas of this scale. From Monsters, Inc.’s corporate culture to Finding Nemo’s submarine suburbia, previous Pixar films have never strayed too far from the rhythms of real life. … WALL‑E creates a world that, despite clear connections to contemporary culture, looks and feels nothing like life as we know it, with unprecedented dramatic and philosophical scope.
Read more >
-
A |
**** |
+2|
Teens & Up*
A compelling thriller, a smoldering love story, a thoughtful study in comparative cultures, and a respectful exploration of religious community and nonviolence, Witness is one of the high points of 1980s American cinema, and remains one of Australian director Peter Weir’s best films as well as his first American film.
Read more >
-
A |
**** |
+2-1|
Teens & Up*
French director Olivier Assayas’s Summer Hours opens with a glimpse into a world that has already passed away, though not all the characters realize it yet.
Read more >
-
A |
**** |
+2|
Teens & Up
Luminous, exquisitely acted and not without a sense of humor, Jane Campion’s Bright Star contemplates how this graceful, stylish, ignorant, sharp-tongued girl ensnared, and was ensnared by, a struggling young Romantic poet with no income and no critical acclaim.
Read more >
-
A |
**** |
+2-2|
Adults
Inception is the most audacious and multifaceted Hollywood entertainment for grown-ups I’ve seen in years: a brainy, bravura achievement inviting comparison to the most inspired work of Hollywood visionaries from Michael Mann and Charlie Kaufman to Ridley Scott and the Wachowskis.
Read more >
-
A |
***½ |
+3|
Teens & Up
Not in the now-distant mythology of World War II, with the
iconic evil of the Nazi regime pitted against the warriors of the
Greatest Generation, or even the likes of larger-than-life Oskar
Schindler. Here is a horror within living memory of nearly anyone
old enough to watch the film, a holocaust without the cover of a
massive bureaucratic machine or industrialized, sanitized gas
chambers.
Read more >
-
A |
***½ |
+0|
Teens & Up
With its time-traveling setting in the familiar milieu of the mid-1980s and its crowd-pleasing celebration of whales and conservationism, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home is the most successful and widely appealing of the Star Trek films, and also the most idiosyncratic.
Read more >
-
A |
***½ |
+3|
Teens & Up*
This is a film
about the legacy of fatherhood and the inheritance of sonship,
about the unbreakable connection and the unbridgeable gap between
one generation and the next. It is a celebration of masculinity,
but it contemplates how men relate to women as an index of their
manhood.
Read more >
-
A |
***½ |
+2|
Kids & Up*
The press kit calls it "James Bond for kids," but this
over-the-top fantasy romp might be more accurately described as a
family-friendly True Lies: The Next Generation, or even a
married-with-children Austin Powers — all with Willy
Wonka-style wonkiness and inspired set design straight out of
Dr. Seuss.
Read more >
-
A |
***½ |
+4|
Kids & Up
The Face, a remarkable two-hour documentary produced in
conjunction with the Catholic Communication Campaign, is a
visually sumptuous and spiritually rewarding exploration of
Christian art that surveys the history of how Jesus Christ has
been portrayed, and how Christian teaching has been understood,
interpreted, and given different emphases by the art of different
times and places.
Read more >
-
A |
***½ |
+2|
Kids & Up*
Rob Reiner’s great cult classic The Princess Bride is one of those rare satiric gems, like The Court Jester and Galaxy Quest, that doesn’t just send up a genre, but honors it at the same time, giving us the excitement and pleasure of the real thing as well as the laughs of a comedy.
Read more >
-
A |
***½ |
+2|
Teens & Up
Ford exudes decency in the role of the innocent man wrongly
accused, as Kimble throughout the movie consistently goes out
of his way to help other people at his own expense, regularly
risking capture and even death for the sake of others. Best known
for playing confident, capable action heroes in the Indiana Jones and Star Wars
movies, Ford is also remarkably persuasive in the role of the
unlikely action hero — the unassuming, nonphysical,
white-collar professional who isn’t used to swashbuckling (a role
he played also in Frantic and Air Force One).
Read more >
-
A |
***½ |
+2|
Kids & Up
With evocative watercolor backgrounds and character design strongly reminiscent of Potter’s illustrations, animation ranging from fine to excellent, and dialogue and narrative drawn straight from the source material, the series is remarkably faithful to the text, spirit, and look of Potter’s beloved stories.
Read more >
-
A |
***½ |
+1|
Teens & Up
Strictly Ballroom starts as an edgy, in-your-face
mockumentary satirizing the rigid pretensions of people who take
competitive ballroom dancing way too seriously. Then by
imperceptible degrees it morphs into a complicated tale of
generations and families, ultimately turning in a crowd-pleasing
fairy-tale ending.
Read more >
-
A |
***½ |
+3|
Kids & Up*
In the crowd of TV documentaries on the life of Pope John Paul II, there is Witness to Hope, and there is everything else.
Read more >
-
A |
***½ |
+3|
Teens & Up*
Though thematically similar to Dead Man Walking, Longford grapples more directly and thoughtfully with religious themes, and doesn’t glorify its eccentric, somewhat tragic protagonist the way Dead Man Walking extols Sister Préjean.
Read more >
-
A |
***½ |
+3|
Kids & Up
As wonky as the proceedings get, director Pete Docter (Monsters, Inc.) and screenwriter and co-director Bob Peterson (Finding Nemo) never entirely lose touch with the ragged human emotions underlying the story. There’s an obvious metaphor in the film itself for the strange blend of realism and zaniness, partly tethered to solid ground, partly twisting in the capricious winds of whimsy.
Read more >
-
A |
***½ |
+4|
Kids & Up
The 13th Day is the best movie ever made about Fátima — the most beautiful and effective, as well as one of the most historically accurate.
Read more >
-
A |
***½ |
+3|
Kids & Up
Everyone should see Babies. Even people who have cats instead of children should see Babies. There are a number of cats in this movie, and some feline moments that must be seen to be believed, especially for cat lovers.
Read more >
-
A- |
**** |
-2|
Teens & Up*
The story is pure Hong Kong melodrama, set at the dawn of the
Chinese Imperial Era in the third century BC. … Yet there’s nothing even marginally conventional about Hero’s overpowering visual splendor, its effulgent riot of color and texture, its overwhelming spectacle of scale.
Read more >
-
A- |
**** |
+1-1|
Teens & Up*
Forget Cast
Away. Forget Alive. Touching the Void, the
true story of a pair of daredevil mountain climbers in the
Peruvian Andes, may be the most harrowing, dazzling, haunting
survival story ever filmed.
Read more >
-
A- |
**** |
+1-2|
Adults
Along with Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark, John McTiernan’s Die Hard defined a generation of action-adventure movies.
Read more >
-
A- |
**** |
-2|
Teens & Up*
Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away is a work of pagan imagination. So are the works of Homer and Sophocles. In all these works there is much for Christian audiences to take exception with as Christians, but also much to marvel at as audiences.
Read more >
-
A- |
**** |
+0|
Kids & Up
Once the advent of digital video freed filmmakers from the constraints of physical film, it was only a matter of time before someone made the first feature film entirely in one take, without a single edit or cut. Russian Ark, Aleksandr Sokurov’s experimental art-house meditation on Russia’s cultural heritage and current identity crisis, has the distinction of being that film.
Read more >
-
A- |
**** |
+1-1|
Adults*
Lecter fascinates us because he embodies qualities that we associate with civilized, reasonable existence, yet he is murderously sociopathic. In our therapeutic age, he’s a shocking reminder that, beyond all psychobabble about “behavior modification” and the like, there remains the sheer reality of good and evil. The doctor is in: God help us all.
Read more >
-
A- |
**** |
+1-1|
Teens & Up
A ubiquitous tagline and a mind-bending
climactic twist made M. Night Shyamalan’s breakout hit The
Sixth Sense a monster sensation — yet this deliberately
paced, psychologically sensitive paranormal thriller is much more
than a one-trick puzzle movie, and holds up well to multiple
viewings.
Read more >
-
A- |
**** |
+2-1|
Teens & Up
Peter Weir’s The Truman Show is a remarkably layered achievement: a deceptively simple fairy tale; a hilariously subversive satire of media excess and the erosion of privacy; a sly exploration of the paranoid, solipsistic fear that the world around one is somehow staged for one’s benefit and everyone else is in on it; and finally an elegant parable about truth and happiness with evocative religious resonances.
Read more >
-
A- |
**** |
+1-1|
Teens & Up
Brilliantly constructed and virtually universal in its appeal, Robert Zemeckis’s Back to the Future blends equal parts hilarity, nostalgia, science fiction, screwball comedy, and white-knuckle suspense in a complex storyline wound tighter than a yo-yo in a centrifuge.
Read more >
-
A- |
**** |
+2-1|
Kids & Up*
How can I describe the inexplicable power of My Neighbor Totoro, Hayao Miyazaki’s timeless, ageless family film? It is like how childhood memories feel, if you had a happy childhood — wide-eyed and blissful, matter-of-factly magical and entrancingly prosaic, a world with discovery lurking around every corner and an inexhaustible universe in one’s backyard.
Read more >
-
A- |
**** |
+3-2|
Adults*
4 Months, like previous Romanian export The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, compels us not to avert our eyes. Even though the actual events remain out of sight — apart from a single, indelible shot not unlike images seen in some types of pro-life materials — its confrontation of the unmentionable is no less devastating.
Read more >
-
A- |
***½ |
+2|
Teens & Up*
But then Braddock cracks a grin and admits, “I won,” and Mae rushes into his arms, and we realize the real significance of Jimmy’s sad-sack look and Mae’s silence. No typical sports-movie marriage, this. For Braddock, a devoted husband and father and an all-around righteous guy, there’s never any doubt that family is his first and last priority; boxing is merely a means of putting bread on the table.
Read more >
-
A- |
***½ |
+1|
Kids & Up*
Hoosiers is more than a sports film — it’s a rousing story of
redemption that cares deeply enough and is knowledgeable enough
about the game to thrill the most demanding devotee, yet also
cares deeply enough about its characters and larger themes that
they matter in themselves, and aren’t just there for the sake of
the game.
Read more >
-
A- |
***½ |
+1|
Teens & Up
Echoes of Abraham and Isaac, the Gospel parables about fathers
and pairs of sons, and the Second Coming run through a stark tale
of an inscrutable, harsh stranger whose unexpected reappearance
in the lives of his two sons is as unexplained as his
disappearance so many years earlier. Our first glimpse of the
nameless father (Vladimir Garin) lying in bed overtly recalls
Mantegna’s Lamentation Over the Dead
Christ — yet this man is anything but Christlike in his
treatment of his newfound sons.
Read more >
-
A- |
***½ |
+4|
Teens & Up*
From the unforgettable opening sequence, with its stunning depiction of the martyrdom of a silent Jesuit missionary at the hands of equally silent South American natives, the film is shot through with piercing, haunting imagery, pictures of enduring imaginative force.
Read more >
-
A- |
***½ |
+3-2|
Adults*
Duvall, who also wrote in addition to
directing and starring, persuasively brings these contradictory
elements together to create a convincingly realized portrait of a
man with whom we cannot quite sympathize nor quite condemn; a man
who wrestles with God with the emotion and frankness of a Job,
yet without Job’s moral uprightness; a man who genuinely and
sincerely preaches Jesus Christ and the gospel as he understands
it everywhere he goes — who, indeed, cannot help preaching Jesus
Christ, who knows nothing but preaching Jesus Christ — but who
also cannot stop sinning.
Read more >
-
A- |
***½ |
+3-2|
Teens & Up
Anthony Hopkins plays “Jack” as a somewhat abstracted ivory-tower
academic rather than the robust and jovial figure he actually was. But
Lewis’ penetrating intellect and faith are here, as is his love for Joy
(Winger), and the crippling grief that came afterwards. A challenging
and inspiring film.
Read more >
-
A- |
***½ |
+0|
Teens & Up*
This is a world in which characters are not larger-than-life cardboard cutouts, but human beings with affecting problems, motives, conflicts, and interests; in which opposing ideas are at least as important as clashing super-powers or martial-arts moves; in which super-powers and special abilities are more than mere arbitrary plot shortcuts or empty pretexts for colorful special effects, but are treated thoughtfully as serious story elements with logical consequences in immediate events and also wider social implications.
Read more >
-
A- |
***½ |
+0|
Teens & Up
The original Trek crew’s real last hurrah, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country is a rousing sendoff for Kirk, Spock, and Bones, and a fitting transition from the original series’ Cold-War milieu to the Next-Generation age of engagement.
Read more >
-
A- |
***½ |
+0|
Teens & Up
The most remarkable thing about Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl is neither Johnny Depp’s mesmerizing performance, nor ILM’s literally eye-popping skeletal ghost-ship crew, but the sheer fact that the movie works at all.
Read more >
-
A- |
***½ |
+1-2|
Teens & Up*
Where other super-hero movies, like James Bond movies, take place in a static universe in which nothing really changes and the essential mythology remains the same, X2 is set in a world in flux. The plot is part of an ongoing story-arc reaching back to X-Men and building toward a future X3.
Read more >
-
A- |
***½ |
+0|
Teens & Up
Holes manages that rare trick of faithfully evoking what was special about the book without becoming slavish or by-the-numbers. Davis captures the book’s blend of coming-of-age realism, tongue-in-cheek grotesquerie, fantasy, and adventure, and capably navigates the plot’s multiple timelines and settlings.
Read more >
-
A- |
***½ |
+2|
Adults
This is one feel-good film that earns its goodwill honestly — not glossing over the harder realities and transgressions that afflict family life, but instead making the case that, however exasperating and even dysfunctional one’s family may happen to be, family remains very close to the center of things. Not just "family" in the abstract, either, or as an ideal, but the reality of family as we actually experience it.
Read more >
-
A- |
***½ |
+1|
Kids & Up
It may seem heresy to baby boomers with fond
memories of Mary Martin singing and flying on NBC, but this
beautifully produced A&E restaging of the musical, starring
gymnast-turned-actress Cathy Rigby, eclipses the beloved 1960
Martin kinescope in almost every way.
Read more >
-
A- |
***½ |
+2-1|
Teens & Up*
John Nash goes through life making connections, but not with other people. He sees meaningful patterns where the rest of us see only unintelligible randomness. Ideas are as real as people to him. Maybe more so. Eventually the ideas become too real — or the people not real enough — and Nash withdraws inexorably into the tangles of his own incandescent mind.
Read more >
-
A- |
***½ |
+2|
Kids & Up*
None of these camel myths seems as curious, improbable, and
magical as The Story of the Weeping Camel itself.
Presented by National Geographic, the film relates the
birth of a rare white camel calf among the herds of an extended
family of four generations living under one roof in the
wilderness, and of the camel calf’s struggle for survival after
its mother, traumatized by the difficult labor, rejects it and
refuses to allow it to suckle. How this family of herders deals
with this small crisis is an unguessable miracle that will
delight children and adults alike.
Read more >
-
A- |
***½ |
+3|
Teens & Up*
Born into Brothels both illustrates and exemplifies the power of art and artists to make a difference. It’s one of the most constructive and inspiring takes on the relationship of art and responsibility, of the artist and the world, that I’ve ever seen.
Read more >
-
A- |
***½ |
+0|
Kids & Up
Director Jacques Perrin and his crew of pilots and
cinematographers spent four years traversing the globe, capturing
unprecedented images of migratory birds in flight and on land.
Shooting from hot-air balloons and ultralight aircraft, the
filmmakers insinuate the camera’s eye so intimately into the
midst of airborne flights of birds that one can almost count the
hairlike barbs on the feathers. Other times, one is staggered by
the sheer number of birds captured in a single shot,
sweeping across the sky like a curtain being drawn or covering an
island to the horizon and the edges of the screen.
Read more >
-
A- |
***½ |
+2|
Kids & Up*
The Emperor’s New Groove is really about another new groove — Disney animation’s. By 2000, the old Disney-as-usual wasn’t selling any more, and Disney was ready to begin trying new things.
Read more >
-
A- |
***½ |
+2|
Teens & Up
From the very first sequence of Peter Jackson’s The Two Towers — a bravura opening that stunningly recalls and continues a central sequence from The Fellowship of the Ring — we feel that we’re in good hands. It’s a promise the subsequent three hours deliver on imperfectly.
Read more >
-
A- |
***½ |
+3-2|
Teens & Up
God bless Sister Helen Travis, with her foul
mouth, black wimple, "I ♥ Jesus" T-shirt, and
irascible, abrasive attitude. She might be a bit crazy, this
feisty, diminutive 69-year-old Benedictine nun living in a
rundown South Bronx building with as many as 20-plus male drug
addicts and alcoholics abiding by her strict regiment of curfews,
urine tests, community service, and biweekly house meetings. But
she’s also the best thing that’s happened to many of them in a
long time.
Read more >
-
A- |
***½ |
+2|
Teens & Up
With unsettling plausibility, first-time director Billy Ray
depicts Glass’s uncanny ability to insinuate himself to his
coworkers while ingeniously covering his tracks, mounting a
deception on such a scale his peers and superiors can scarcely
comprehend it even when he’s practically caught red-handed.
Read more >
-
A- |
***½ |
+1|
Kids & Up
Spellbound, Jeffrey Blitz’s endearing, heartbreaking,
deeply rewarding documentary about eight brainy middle-school
kids competing with nearly 250 other spellers in front of the
ESPN-watching world, is full of such unforgettable moments. Not
just a documentary of a contest, Spellbound is a
behind-the-scenes look at the lives of contestants of various
regional and socioeconomic backgrounds whose only common bond is
a facility with putting words together.
Read more >
-
A- |
***½ |
+2|
Teens & Up
Unsurprisingly, the film is true to its theatrical roots: low-key, set mostly within the confines of an upper West Side apartment, centered on the conversation between the fire captain and the writer. In keeping with the minimal production values of the stage play, the film was shot in nine days on a limited budget. Dramatic 9/11 footage, flashbacks of the missing firefighters, even a romance between Nick and Joan were all proposed by Hollywood producers, but the filmmakers rightly sensed that anything like this would have been disastrous.
Read more >
-
A- |
***½ |
+0|
Kids & Up
The world of Monsters, Inc. is a more artificial and contrived affair than the Toy Story world, and something of the figure of the Monster in myth and fairy tale and imagination has been lost. Yet there’s also a slyly satiric point: Childhood fears aren’t what they used to be.
Read more >
-
A- |
***½ |
+0|
Adults*
The shadow of September 11 will not always
hang over the movies, but as I watched Ridley Scott’s Black
Hawk Down it seemed to be everywhere: an ominous column of
smoke rising from a city skyline; people watching helplessly via
video screens as a catastrophe unfolds before their eyes in real
time; enemies striking an unexpected and terrible blow that seems
to be as bad as anything can possibly be — followed by a second,
equally terrible blow.
Read more >
-
A- |
***½ |
+1-1|
Adults
Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) has come a long way since he was fished out of the ocean with a pair of bullet holes in his body and even bigger holes in his memory. His past is still a blank, mostly, but he’s finally fully in command of his devastating training and skills as a CIA black-ops agent. These days, when he kicks into high gear, it’s by design, not reflex.
Read more >
-
A- |
***½ |
+0|
Teens & Up
In a way, the obnoxious tell-all trailer for
Cast Away gives away more than the film itself. That
trailer, with moronic thoroughness, reveals the film’s set-up,
the crisis, the hero’s ups and downs, his triumph, the climax,
and the denouement. What it doesn’t let on is that the movie
itself won’t tell you what to think or how to feel about what
happens, even at the end. The trailer is typical Hollywood
feel-good, inspirational fare; the story in the film is rather
more ambiguous and challenging.
Read more >
-
A- |
***½ |
+2-1|
Teens & Up
From the rousing fanfare of the classic John Williams score to the comic book–inspired opening credits, it’s clear that Superman Returns means to be nothing less than the film that Superman III could have and should have been, but wasn’t. Except it’s actually better than that.
Read more >
-
A- |
***½ |
+2|
Teens & Up
Au Revoir Les Enfants, Louis Malle’s semi-autobiographical film about life in a Catholic boarding school for boys in Nazi-occupied France, has been called an elegy of innocence lost, though in fact the youthful characters are never truly innocent, only clueless, and what they lose is not innocence but something more elusive.
Read more >
-
A- |
***½ |
+2|
Adults*
Steven Spielberg’s harrowing WWII drama opens with a horrifying recreation of the D-Day invasion of Normandy Beach that has been called the most realistic war sequence ever shot.
Read more >
-
A- |
***½ |
+0|
Kids & Up
Loosely structured into thematic "chapters" such as "light,"
"rhythm," and "grace," accompanied by an ecclectic Eric Serra
score, Atlantis is a documentary Fantasia, a poetic marriage of image
and music (though the score, apart from an aria from Bellini’s
La Sonnambula, lacks the pedigree of Disney’s
masterpiece). Marred only by a brief opening voiceover, which
muses pretentiously about man’s evolutionary origins in the
ocean, Besson’s otherwise wordless film lets the beauty of the
undersea world speak for itself.
Read more >
-
A- |
***½ |
+0|
Teens & Up
Despite numerous cinematic adaptations — including Steve
Martin’s cute romantic-comedy update Roxanne — the
definitive Cyrano is probably Jean-Paul Rappeneau’s
boisterous, full-blooded film, with France’s greatest actor,
Gérard Depardieu, making the part forever his own.
Read more >
-
A- |
***½ |
+1|
Teens & Up
From nonagenarian writer-director Manoel de Oliveira, who’s
been making movies for over seven decades, comes a sad,
thoughtful character study of an aging French actor named Gilbert
Valence (Michel Piccoli). On stage, in productions of Ionesco’s
Exit the King and Shakespeare’s The Tempest,
Valence gives impressive readings of the dramatic death-speeches
of aged protagonists; but his own words in a key moment of
frailty and finality, though equally haunting, are much more
prosaic and anticlimactic.
Read more >
-
A- |
***½ |
+3|
Kids & Up
The story is propelled by ordinary (though sometimes philosophically elevated) dialogue, and a mysterious character in the play, Adam, becomes a simple priest — a rather Wojtyla-like priest, actually, who takes the young people of his parish on nature hikes in the mountains.
Read more >
-
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.
Read more >
-
A- |
***½ |
+2-2|
Adults*
Based on Sir Walter Scott’s historical novel,
this is the story of Rob Roy MacGregor (Neeson), head of a
Scottish highland clan who seeks to better the plight of his
people with money borrowed from local nobility, only to have the
money stolen by confederates of the corrupt nobility.
Read more >
-
A- |
***½ |
-1|
Teens & Up*
(Written by Jimmy Akin) The main cast is no longer trapped in amber — never changing their relationships, never getting promoted, never leaving the Enterprise. They’ve become unstuck. It’s a sign of things to come.
Read more >
-
A- |
***½ |
+1|
Teens & Up
Thirteen Days is about how a few imperfect men more or
less saved the world. Whatever else Kennedy and these other men
may or may not have done, this was perhaps their finest hour, and
the world owes them a debt of gratitude. If the threat of
Mutually Assured Destruction seems remote and antiquated today,
it is at least partly because of the events dramatized in this
film. Thirteen Days is a fitting dramatic tribute to the
deadly brinksmanship that pulled us back from the edge during the
most volatile two weeks of the Cold War.
Read more >
-
A- |
***½ |
+1|
Kids & Up
If love makes the world go round, the dizzily whirling globe in the opening title credits of Douglas McGrath’s Emma is a clear statement of intent regarding the film’s theme. And when we see the globe is a painted model spinning on a thread in the hand of Emma (delightfully effervescent Gwyneth Paltrow), it’s clear how Emma sees herself — pulling the strings, orchestrating the happy convergences that make the world go round.
Read more >
-
A- |
***½ |
+1-1|
Adults
Like the memory-impaired antihero of Memento, the protagonist of Doug Liman’s The Bourne Identity (and a trilogy of Robert Ludlum novels before that) has no choice but to trust himself even though he can’t be sure he’s a trustworthy individual. Perhaps his honorable aspirations themselves are a good sign. Certainly the amazing abilities and instincts that suddenly surface when needed are clues to who and what he is. Jason may not know much, but he’s pretty sure he’s something out of the ordinary.
Read more >
-
A- |
***½ |
-1+2|
Teens & Up
Millions is a rare and special family film: a moral parable rather than a morality tale; a film that combines high ideals and hard realities; a story of hope and faith in something more than Santa Claus. Which is not to say that Santa Claus, or rather St. Nicholas, doesn’t show up. But when he pops on a bishop’s mitre rather than the familiar red Santa hat, it’s clear we’re not in Hollywood movieland here.
Read more >
-
A- |
***½ |
+2|
Kids & Up
Not a remake of the 1939 classic but a new adaptation of James Hilton’s sentimental novella, Masterpiece Theater’s engrossing Goodbye Mr. Chips couldn’t be more different from the 1939 film — and that’s all to the good.
Read more >
-
A- |
***½ |
+2|
Teens & Up
Thrilling, heartbreaking, witty, romantic, and largely family-friendly, The Mask of Zorro is possibly the best swashbuckler of its decade, a film at once true to the spirit of the classic period actioners and also thoroughly of its own time.
Read more >
-
A- |
***½ |
+3|
Adults*
Tsotsi seems almost entirely severed from human values, and his seemingly total moral apathy rattles the conscience-stricken Boston. “Decency, Tsosti,” Boston harangues. “Do you know the word?”
Read more >
-
A- |
***½ |
+2|
Kids & Up*
This is no slight to the BBC miniseries; its glory is precisely its wonderfully literary quality. By contrast, the 2005 film is wonderfully non-literary. The BBC miniseries is peopled with living, breathing characters; the 2005 film is peopled with living breathing human beings. This is not to diminish the definitive achievement of the BBC miniseries, but to appreciate the freshness of a retelling that does something new.
Read more >
-
A- |
***½ |
+0|
Teens & Up
The Raiders comparison is more apt here than in the original, where the swordplay and such was more energetic and well-done than inspired. The sequel takes the slapstick swashbuckling to a completely new level, evoking the ingenuity and physical comedy of a Buster Keaton or Jackie Chan set piece, crossed with the Rube Goldberg logic of a Chuck Jones cartoon.
Read more >
-
A- |
***½ |
+1|
Kids & Up*
Lassie is a rare family film that knows that kids live in a grown-up world, that they are not isolated from such realities as unemployment or war, and can relate to the problems of adult characters as well as those of children and animals.
Read more >
-
A- |
***½ |
+1|
Teens & Up
Spider‑Man 3 is a movie stuffed to bursting — with action, plotlines, characters, humor, energy, moods, spectacle and certainly inspiration. Like its web-headed hero careening crazily through the canyons of Manhattan at the end of a web-line, the film swings breathlessly and without warning from one thing to another, from breakneck excitement to outrageous silliness to comic-book morals about responsibility, sacrifice and now even vengeance and forgiveness.
Read more >
-
A- |
***½ |
+2|
Kids & Up*
Ratatouille is a revelation — a delightfully surprising discovery in a genre that seldom surprises even savvy youngsters, a warm and winsome confection that will be treasured by viewers young and old long after the mediocrities of summer 2007 have been justly forgotten.
Read more >
-
A- |
***½ |
+2|
Adults
With The Bourne Ultimatum the eponymous hero has accomplished something rare indeed: Jason Bourne has gone the distance for three straight films. With The Bourne Identity and The Bourne Supremacy, The Bourne Ultimatum seals the achievement of a rare action franchise for thinking adults, combining gripping entertainment with an undercurrent of moral seriousness.
Read more >
-
A- |
***½ |
+3-2|
Teens & Up*
Yet it’s right around this point that Juno, which has been clever and insightful, unexpectedly reveals hidden layers of complexity and depth.
Read more >
-
A- |
***½ |
+2|
Kids & Up
One book can’t contain Horton’s dogged heroics!
His stoical pluck shows up all other stoics! …
And it gets even better! I’m pleased to relate
That Horton’s the very best Blue Sky to date.
Read more >
-
A- |
***½ |
+2|
Kids & Up
The Spiderwick Chronicles is a smart, scary fantasy family thriller that offers depth and meaning in a genre littered with mere competent entertainment. Where films like Zathura and Night at the Museum offer roller-coaster excitement but little more, The Spiderwick Chronicles is actually about something.
Read more >
-
A- |
***½ |
+2|
Teens & Up
The Express is a rare inspirational sports film that remembers who sports are supposed to inspire: other people.
Read more >
-
A- |
***½ |
+2-1|
Teens & Up*
Survival is not the supreme value, but it has a unique power to put other values into perspective. We say, too often and unthinkingly, that we would “rather die” than do this or that. It is a salutary thing not to fear death, but there is nothing salutary about trivializing the precious gift of life — precious, not only to ourselves, but also to those left behind.
Read more >
-
A- |
***½ |
+1|
Kids & Up
It’s not quite Pixar grade, but Bolt blots out tepid memories of the likes of Chicken Little and Home on the Range, standing comfortably beside the likes of Kung Fu Panda and Horton Hears a Who in the race for second-best computer-animated family film of 2008.
Read more >
-
A- |
***½ |
+0|
Kids & Up
Welcome to Earth. Adapted by directors Alastair Fothergill and Mark Linfield from producer Fothergill’s groundbreaking 550-minute BBC miniseries “Planet Earth,” Earth offers an impressive selection of some of the most astounding images ever captured of the natural world. Many of the film’s sights had never been witnessed or photographed before Fothergill and the BBC Natural History Unit set out to create “the definitive look at the diversity of our planet,” as “Planet Earth” is not unreasonably billed.
Read more >
-
A- |
***½ |
+0|
Teens & Up
And so, for the first time in forever, we have Star Trek really and truly boldly going where we haven’t been before — taking Kirk, Spock, Bones, Uhura, Scotty, Sulu and Checkov on a brand-new adventure for the very first time. Before you know it, you’re getting to know old friends in an entirely new light. It’s like what Alan Moore said about Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns: “Everything is exactly the same, except for the fact that it’s all completely different.”
Read more >
-
A- |
***½ |
+2|
Teens & Up
There’s an ambitious modesty to Duncan Jones’s debut film Moon, a smart, existential science-fiction drama with one onscreen actor that runs 97 minutes and goes nowhere more exotic than our planet’s natural satellite.
Read more >
-
A- |
***½ |
+2-2|
Adults*
C. S. Lewis’s bleak prediction about human mistreatment of extraterrestrial creatures was framed in terms of human spacefarers encountering alien life on distant worlds, but the gist of his thesis is eminently applicable to the scenario proposed in District 9, a caustic and gory but sharply made sci-fi fable with a pungent South African flavor.
Read more >
-
A- |
***½ |
+1|
Teens & Up*
Each of us would like to think that, in such situations as the movie poses, we would do the right thing; in moments of crisis, we tell ourselves that that is what we have done. The Informant! confronts us with the inveterate human capacity for self-justification and self-deception, and the extent to which we are all prone to casting ourselves as the hero of our own drama and the victim of our own tragedy.
Read more >
-
A- |
***½ |
+2|
Kids & Up*
The Things are potent symbols that refuse to yield to a single interpretation. Carol blends Max’s angry, destructive impulses and anxieties with Max’s mother’s concern and, dimly, the reassuring voice of the father who isn’t there. It’s not hard to see where Carol and KW’s quarrels come from, and KW’s absences are the flip side of Carol’s surrogate fatherhood, but Max’s sister is also in KW, off cavorting with her new friends and leaving Carol, and thus Max, in the lurch.
Read more >
-
A- |
***½ |
-1+2|
Adults
Crazy Heart’s turning point becomes a moment of clarity not only for Bad, but for Jean as well. It’s a film that is more hopeful and redemptive than its characters have a right to be, but along with hope is awareness of potentially irrevocable consequences.
Read more >
-
A- |
***½ |
+1|
Kids & Up
From the Leonardo-like engineering illustrations of the opening credit sequence to the hauntingly surreal final image on the edge of space, Hayao Miyazaki’s Laputa, or Castle in the Sky as it’s been dubbed for English-speaking audiences, displays the filmmaker’s visionary brilliance as a shaper of worlds as compellingly as any film he has made.
Read more >
-
A- |
***½ |
+1|
Kids & Up
Nature docs thrive on firsts, though, and Oceans has some eye-poppers. The unprecedented spectacle of a blue whale feeding on krill, its ventral pouch inflated with water, is breathtaking (you never see blue whales in these things; humpbacks get all the glory). The colorful silken splendor of the blanket octopus and the ribbon eel were a surprise to me (nicely complemented by the Spanish dancer sea slug). And my new favorite freaky thing, supplanting the anatomical absurdity of the leafy seadragon, is the wack-eyed mantis shrimp, a testy little fellow who gets violently territorial with crabs loitering around his front door — as one learns to its grief. Get off my lawn, punk.
Read more >
-
A- |
*** |
+4|
Teens & Up
It is, so to speak, not "based on" St. John’s Gospel at all, so much as it is St. John’s Gospel — visualized and enacted to be sure, and to that extent interpreted and glossed, but not "adapted" in the usual sense.
Read more >
-
A- |
*** |
+4|
Kids & Up
Eschewing both the slickness and Hollywood sentiment of The Song of Bernadette and the speculative psychology of Alain Cavalier’s contemporary Thérèse, Delannoy’s unembellished, straightforward account seeks only to tell Bernadette’s story in a clear and compelling way.
Read more >
-
A- |
*** |
+3-2|
Teens & Up
Like The Mask of Zorro, Monte Cristo balances its anachronistic sensibilities and over-the-top set pieces with genuine emotion and a real moral dimension — even, in Monte Cristo, a spiritual dimension. This is an action movie that’s also a morality play, a tale of injustice and vengeance that actually reckons on God, faith, and divine justice.
Read more >
-
A- |
*** |
++2-2|
Teens & Up
A native of Belgium, ordained in Honolulu, at the age of 33
Fr. Damien volunteered to become the first and only priest serving
the leper colony. There he spent himself attending as best he could to
the people’s needs, both spiritual and physical, offering the
sacraments but also dressing wounds, helping to shelter them from the
elements, even constructing coffins and digging graves.
Read more >
-
A- |
*** |
+4|
Teens & Up*
It’s a melancholy truth that religion is often
a key ingredient in long-standing conflicts festering in certain
troubled regions around the globe: the Middle East, Northern
Ireland, the Balkans. Final Solution depicts the way
religion has been involved in the racial strife in South Africa — but it also points to the role that faith can and should play in
reconciliation and healing as well.
Read more >
-
A- |
*** |
+4|
Teens & Up*
The first feature film from the Paulist Fathers’ moviemaking
division, John Duigan’s Romero tells the true story of
Latin America’s best-known and most revered modern martyr, Oscar
Arnulfo Romero y Goldamez, a man whom John Paul II described as a
"zealous pastor who gave his life for his flock," and at whose
tomb in San Salvador Pope John Paul II has prayed when visiting El
Salvador.
Read more >
-
A- |
*** |
+4|
Kids & Up
Warner Bros’ The Miracle of Our Lady of Fatima may be better known, but Daniel Costelle’s 1992 Portuguese production Apparitions at Fatima is a more historically accurate and spiritually sensitive account of the visionary experiences of three young Portuguese children in 1917, culminating in the miracle of the sun witnessed by thousands.
Read more >
-
A- |
*** |
+3|
Kids & Up*
From It’s a Wonderful Life to A Christmas Carol, from Miracle on 34th Street to Tim Allen’s Santa Clause films, there are more Christmas movies than you could watch in all twelve days. Yet even at the height of Hollywood biblical epics, the real meaning of Christmas was essentially ignored (a few brief scenes in Ben-Hur notwithstanding). The Nativity Story goes a long way toward redressing this historic omission.
Read more >
-
A- |
*** |
+1-1|
Teens & Up*
At once delicate and gritty, wistful and deeply satisfying, John Carney’s Once is a intimate little film that, like a favorite song, you would rather play for someone than try to describe.
Read more >
-
A- |
*** |
+2|
Kids & Up
At times Toy Story 3 feels a bit less fleet-footed than its predecessors, though there’s nothing that doesn’t work. Lee Unkrich, who co-directed Toy Story 2, Monsters, Inc. and Finding Nemo, directs with a sure hand. The story is stuffed with wit and invention, such as a couple of premise-bending applications of the Potato Heads’ modular body parts and some hilarious riffing on Ken and Barbie.
Read more >
-
B+ |
***½ |
+2|
Teens & Up*
Compared to the theatrically released Hotel Rwanda, Sometimes in April is grimmer, less focused, and more
uncompromising. Both films focus on a connected, successful Hutu
family man with a Tutsi wife and a number of children, but this
man’s story, in which the past of 1994 and the present are
intercut, is more ambiguous and tragic.
Read more >
-
B+ |
***½ |
+0|
Teens & Up
Based on the whimsical comic book series of the same name,
Men in Black looks superficially like another
Independence Day-style big-budget summer special-effects
extravaganza with a catchy three-letter acronym. Yet MIB
is smarter, leaner, funnier, and more human than most entries in
the genre, relying less on spectacle than on the chemistry of the
two leads and the wit of the script for its appeal.
Read more >
-
B+ |
***½ |
+2-2|
Teens & Up
As imagined by Tim Burton in stunning, wildly stylized stop-motion animation overtly reminiscent of The Nightmare Before Christmas yet technically far beyond it, this macabre fairy tale becomes, variously, a poignant meditation on the daunting weightiness of the vows of marriage, a raucous danse macabre in jumping jazz rhythms and florid colors, a visually rich celebration of Edward Gorey Gothic-Victorian and Charles Addams grotesque, and, perhaps most surprisingly, a touching portrait of tragedy, doomed love, empathy, and sacrifice.
Read more >
-
B+ |
***½ |
+2-1|
Kids & Up*
One of the pinnacles of non-Disney American
animation, Brad Bird’s The Iron Giant is a nostalgic
fantasy in the spirit of E.T. about
a young boy (Eli Marienthal) growing up in a fatherless house,
whose unusual friendship with a being from outer space — here a
giant robot (Vin Diesel) with a penchant for eating metal — has
to be hidden from his mom (Jennifer Aniston) and the federal
government.
Read more >
-
B+ |
***½ |
+1|
Adults
Daylight floods Dormer’s life, relentless, ubiquitous — like
the penetrating glare of the ongoing Internal Affairs probe back
in LA, where Dormer may or may not have something to hide. Like
the searching gaze of Alaskan local cop Ellie Burr (Hilary Swank)
as she investigates Dormer’s account of a second killing that
occurs when an attempt to catch the killer goes tragically awry.
Like "the eye of God that will not blink," as Roger Ebert
describes the Arctic Circle’s midnight sun in his review of the
original film.
Read more >
-
B+ |
***½ |
+2|
Kids & Up*
With its swashbuckling action and blend of traditional and 3D
computer animation, Sinbad most resembles Disney’s Treasure Planet — yet for once
DreamWorks handily outdoes its archrival, with bravura action set
pieces, a surprisingly complex romantic triangle, and an even
more remarkably thoughtful exploration of moral issues and
character.
Read more >
-
B+ |
***½ |
+2|
Kids & Up
Remarkably, Stuart Little 2 manages to be both more
satisfying for adults and more kid-friendly than the original.
Older viewers will appreciate the sequel’s stronger story and
witty script; and even little kids who might have found the
original film’s menacing Central Park gangster cats too intense
may be able to watch this film’s villainous falcon without fear
of bad dreams.
Read more >
-
B+ |
***½ |
+1|
Kids & Up*
Lilo & Stitch is a unique imaginative
achievement that succeeds in its own right, without laying down
any kind of template for future films to follow. Attempts to
repeat its success, to make it into a formula, would be a dismal
failure, unless perhaps the formula were to be "Give the creative
people room to try something new and let them work without a
safety net." What a concept.
Read more >
-
B+ |
***½ |
+0|
Teens & Up
Miramax execs would like you to think of Iron Monkey as this year’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. It might be more accurate, though, to call it this year’s The Legend of Drunken Master.
Read more >
-
B+ |
***½ |
+0|
Teens & Up
Despite the macabre humor, there’s something touchingly innocent about Halloweentown. Its inhabitants live for fear and thrills, yet there’s no real malice in any of them — with the exception of a sort of Halloween outlaw named Mr. Oogie Boogie and his three young protégés.
Read more >
-
B+ |
***½ |
+3-2|
Teens & Up*
Alain Cavalier’s stark, austere reflection on the mystery of the little saint of Lisieux’s romance with Jesus… is a reverie rather than a meditation, built of fleeting minimalist vignettes, almost snapshots, glimpses of its subject rather than an integral portrait. There is no sense of judgment, of approval or disapproval of its subject’s life, or even, finally, of real understanding. His Thérèse is a riddle, and we must make of her what we can.
Read more >
-
B+ |
***½ |
-1|
Teens & Up*
(Written by Jimmy Akin) This is the story of a civil war. Not the one
you’re familiar with, but one that occurred a quarter century
earlier. In this civil war, the North seceded from the South, and
since the secessionists won, it’s not called a civil war but a
revolution: the Texas Revolution.
Read more >
-
B+ |
***½ |
+0|
Kids & Up*
The film knows that to a young girl hopelessly in love, this
race is no grandly romantic gesture, but a matter of desperate
necessity. She must, must catch the wagon; he must
have the dumplings. Her future happiness depends upon it; all is
lost if she fails.
Read more >
-
B+ |
***½ |
+1-1|
Teens & Up
Period letters and songs, archival and modern photography, and
illustrative anecdotes as well as broad analysis are all deployed
to convey the flavor as well as the sequence of historical
events. We learn how Irishmen came to America expecting streets
paved with gold, and wound up not only paving the streets
themselves but building the bridges, skyscrapers, and
railroads.
Read more >
-
B+ |
***½ |
+2-1|
Adults
These two "martyrs" are not saints; nor are they as cautious
and discreet as Thomas More in A Man for All Seasons, which
leaves them open to unnecessary suffering. A sobering examination
of corruption, courage, cowardice, and the sometimes catastrophic
costs of telling the truth.
Read more >
-
B+ |
***½ |
+1|
Kids & Up*
More than most films of its ilk, We Are Marshall rises above the clichés that define the genre, connecting sport to larger issues in an emotionally satisfying way.
Read more >
-
B+ |
***½ |
+1-2|
Adults
For long-suffering “Firefly” fans, Serenity is at last a precious opportunity to find out what happens next, not to mention to learn the answers to nagging questions left hanging by the series’ abrupt demise — a journey that is at once thrilling, rewarding, heartbreaking, and wistful. For non-fans, Serenity is a delirious excursion into a world whose setting, characters and relationships are richer and more elaborate than any one-shot movie is likely to be.
Read more >
-
B+ |
***½ |
-1|
Kids & Up*
Stop-motion animation cult heroes Wallace & Gromit, the brainchildren of British animator Nick Park of Aardman Animations, may not be unchanged in the transition from their charmingly dotty, wildly funny shorts to their first feature-length film, but they’re still recognizably themselves.
Read more >
-
B+ |
***½ |
+0|
Kids & Up*
With its dark tale of changeling parents and imprisoned souls, Coraline comes closer to the spirit of the traditional European fairy tale than perhaps any other film, animated or otherwise, in recent memory.
Read more >
-
B+ |
***½ |
-2|
Teens & Up*
James Cameron’s Avatar is a virtual apotheosis of Hollywood mythopoeia. It is the whole worldview and memory of contemporary Hollywood, given shape in a narrative and pictoral form that is stunning in its finality and grandeur. It is like everything and there is nothing like it.
Read more >
-
B+ |
***½ |
+1-2|
Kids & Up*
I love that Brother Aidan’s cat in The Secret of Kells is called Pangur Bán. The unknown eighth or ninth-century Irish monk who, in a playful respite from his normal work, penned in the margins of a Latin New Testament manuscript an affectionate ode in his native tongue to the mouse-catching prowess of his white cat would surely be astounded to find Pangur Bán again commemorated in pen and ink over a millenium later, romping across backgrounds that look at times like the decorative work of the monks themselves brought to life.
Read more >
-
B+ |
*** |
+3|
Teens & Up
Bonhoeffer notes the seeming oddity of the prominence of its subject, whose celebrity today may seem from one perspective disproportionate to his importance as a theologian and ecumenist and certainly as a relatively unimportant conspirator in a failed assassination attempt. Yet as another 20th-century saint once said, “We are called upon not to be successful, but to be faithful.” Bonhoeffer was faithful to the giving of his own life, which he did as willingly and serenely as any martyr.
Read more >
-
B+ |
*** |
+1-1|
Teens & Up
Crippled as he is by the decisions of the first two films, Lucas still manages to invest the final chapter of his sprawling space opera with the grandly operatic spirit of the original trilogy. It’s still cornball, yes, and with all the usual weaknesses. But Episode III at last has heart.
Read more >
-
B+ |
*** |
+2|
Kids & Up
Faithfully adapted from the popular Newbery Honor novel by Kate DiCamillo, Because of Winn-Dixie is a good family film frequently verging on being an excellent one, and is quite a bit better than the dog-movie clichés suggested by the trailers.
Read more >
-
B+ |
*** |
+0|
Teens & Up*
From its breathless, cartoony title sequence, with the letters of cast members’ names stuck like flies in a vast spiderweb, Spider-Man makes its intentions crystal clear: This is one wide-eyed comic-book movie that revels in its pulp origins.
Read more >
-
B+ |
*** |
+1|
Kids & Up*
Miracle manages the neat trick of establishing this game as much more than a game without making it all about politics or turning the Soviet players into ideological bad guys. Like Seabiscuit, with its Depression-era tale of a scrappy underdog racehorse taking on the much-favored champion thoroughbreds, Miracle establishes its setting in a time when American spirit is at a low ebb and people are ready to rally behind an underdog hero who can help them believe in comebacks and David-and-Goliath upsets.
Read more >
-
B+ |
*** |
+0|
Teens & Up
There are also plenty of film geeks who know and love the pulp
fantasies of the early twentieth century, from Metropolis to the serialized
swashbucklers of Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon. Some of these
geeks are even creative enough to weave their own fantasies in
the spirit of those classic films, even to the point of writing
and directing the films themelves, though to date the only film
actually made this way, as far as I know, is Star Wars. (Raiders of the Lost Ark,
perhaps the ultimate serial-adventure homage, was conceived by
George Lucas but written by Lawrence Kasdan and directed by
Steven Spielberg.)
Read more >
-
B+ |
*** |
+2|
Kids & Up*
There’s an easygoing, folksy charm to this film, accentuated by a country-themed soundtrack and characters who say such things as “I’m gonna need a longer street for that talk” and “Lord knows I’m ready for both sides of the bed to be warm again.”
Read more >
-
B+ |
*** |
+1|
Kids & Up*
Annaud’s skill and subtlety elevate what is essentially a simple, fable-like throwback to the sort of live-action feature Disney used to make in the 1950s.
Read more >
-
B+ |
*** |
+2-1|
Kids & Up*
The pursuit of happiness. That’s what Louis Schwartzberg, a stock cinematographer who took a break from shooting landscape and cityscape footage for Hollywood movies to roam the country collecting the two dozen portraits that make up America’s Heart and Soul, has captured.
Read more >
-
B+ |
*** |
+2|
Teens & Up
The Gilbreths were certainly disciplined and well-behaved, but
there was also something a bit "off" about the whole family, and
one could be excused for getting the definite impression that
only a professional efficiency expert like Mr. Gilbreth could
even think about having so many offspring.
Read more >
-
B+ |
*** |
+2|
Kids & Up
(Review by Mark Shea) I know. It sounds uninspiring on paper, if you haven’t seen
them. But — you gotta trust me on this — these guys are really
funny, a sort of strange brew mixing Monty Python, MTV, your
third grade Sunday School teacher and a tiny bit of Robin
Williams — all with a G rating.
Read more >
-
B+ |
*** |
+0|
Kids & Up*
(Review by Jimmy Akin) The City of Townsville… is in
desperate need of heroes!
Read more >
-
B+ |
*** |
+1|
Kids & Up*
The lion’s share of the credit for Ice Age goes to the sloth.
Read more >
-
B+ |
*** |
+1|
Kids & Up*
Robots combines the visionary alternate world-building of Monsters, Inc., the flair for gadgetry and gimmickry of an old Fleishers cartoon, and most sneakily of all, the toybox nostalgia of the Toy Story movies, with cleverly worked-in toy and game references — “Operation,” Slinky, Wheelo — that will have adults grinning with recognition.
Read more >
-
B+ |
*** |
+2-2|
Teens & Up*
From a moral-spiritual perspective, the film has two flaws: It
takes an indulgent view of the couple’s premarital intimacy, and
it depicts the groom-to-be’s Greek Orthodox baptism in purely
cultural, non-religious terms ("I’m Greek now," he says
afterwards). Fortunately, these isolated lapses are more than
overshadowed by the film’s redemptive pro-family themes,
memorably summed up by Toula’s father in a final speech full of
genuine warmth.
Read more >
-
B+ |
*** |
+0|
Kids & Up
Real chickens, I have it on expert testimony, are homebodies
who do not actually pine for freedom, as do the heroines of
Chicken Run. Whereas these poultry-farm prisoners plot and
scheme endlessly to contrive by any means necessary to get under,
over, or around their chicken-wire prison wall, my wife’s hens
actually perch atop the five-foot fence that surrounds our back
yard. They are quite capable of escaping, but have no interest in
doing so.
Read more >
-
B+ |
*** |
+0|
Teens & Up*
Read more >
-
B+ |
*** |
+2|
Teens & Up
The pious, folksy Irish and Italian
Catholicism of Carroll O’Connor and his cronies isn’t there for
the sake of either mockery or preachiness, but is simply taken
for granted, just as it might have been in a film of this sort
from fifty years ago, when they still made them. The story also
takes for granted (indeed, depends upon) the fact that the hero
and the heroine manage to fall in love and grow together without
taking their clothes off.
Read more >
-
B+ |
*** |
+1|
Kids & Up
To human observers, the ways in which animal behavior variously resembles or contrasts with human behavior is an inexhausible source of fascination. Catch animals behaving one way, and we can’t help marveling at how “almost human” they seem. Catch them behaving another way, and we’re struck by the unbridgeable gulf between the animal and human worlds.
Read more >
-
B+ |
*** |
+0|
Kids & Up*
(Written by Jimmy Akin) Scooby-Doo was born in 1969. He was reborn
almost thirty years later, in 1998.
Read more >
-
B+ |
*** |
+0|
Kids & Up
Like the Peter Rabbit episodes, The Wind in the
Willows begins and ends with charming live-action sequences,
this time featuring a narrator (Vanessa Redgrave) telling the
story to some children. Once again episodes and dialogue are
drawn straight from the source material, though with Grahame’s
much longer story more editing has been necessary. The animation,
though less striking than Peter Rabbit’s lovely watercolor
backgrounds, evokes the classic illustrations of Ernest
Shepard.
Read more >
-
B+ |
*** |
+0|
Teens & Up*
Not the best or most exciting of comic-book movies to date, but the most thoughtful and arguably one of the most interesting, Ang Lee’s Hulk offers a new look at Marvel Comics’s green-skinned Jekyll-and-Hyde pulp anti-hero through the director’s poetic, psychologically attuned sensibilities.
Read more >
-
B+ |
*** |
+2-2|
Adults
The film’s central conceit involves an unexpected culinary
snag of anxiety-nightmare proportions mere hours before April’s
family is to arrive, which forces April to appeal for help to her
hitherto unknown neighbors, the previously anonymous faces in the
hallways of her apartment building. It’s an updated version of
the Pilgrims and the Indians — a point the film drives home just
a bit too cutely as April tries to explain the meaning of
Thanksgiving to a large Asian family: "There came a day when they
knew they needed each other, when they knew they couldn’t do it
alone."
Read more >
-
B+ |
*** |
+3-1|
Teens & Up
Secret Lives: Hidden Children and Their Rescuers During
WWII, directed by Oscar-winning documentarian Aviva Slesin,
who is herself a childhood Holocaust survivor hidden from the
Nazis by a Lithuanian Christian family, is an uplifting,
shattering, heartfelt tribute to the Gentile families across
Europe from Poland to the Netherlands who risked their own lives
to take in and hide Jewish children in their homes. Based
entirely on interviews with the Jewish survivors and with their
rescuers and parents, Secret Lives explores the
devastating impact of the Holocaust even on those who survived
it, as well as the nobility and heroism displayed by many during
one of the darkest chapters of human history.
Read more >
-
B+ |
*** |
+2-1|
Adults
More than other recent biopics such as Ray and Kinsey, which made a show of “warts and all” even-handedness even as they softened the reality, Walk the Line dares to allow its protagonist to be genuinely unsympathetic.
Read more >
-
B+ |
*** |
+2|
Kids & Up
But then, added to all that, Jimmy also learns moral lessons
about parents, family, obedience, consequences, and so on that
callow Calvin would never have glommed to in a million years.
Read more >
-
B+ |
*** |
+1|
Teens & Up
The Dish is closer in spirit to gentle British
and Irish comedies like Waking Ned Devine and The
Matchmaker than more characteristically edgy Australian
comedies such as Strictly
Ballroom, Muriel’s Wedding, and Priscilla,
Queen of the Desert. Sam Neill, leading the Australian cast,
sets the tone; his deliberate, relaxed performance as Cliff is at
the center of the film, as he plays Andy Griffith to the
residents of this down-under Mayberry.
Read more >
-
B+ |
*** |
+1-1|
Teens & Up
Although the title is taken from the first volume of
Churchill’s history of the war, The Gathering Storm is as
much about Churchill’s personal life as his political trajectory — sometimes to excess, since the political side is usually more
interesting. The warts-and-all portrait includes his loving but
sometimes strained marriage to Clementina (Vanessa Redgrave), his
financial troubles and hard drinking habits, his melancholia or
"black dog," his amateur painting and bricklaying, and his habit
of absent-mindedly losing himself in rehearsing or dictating
speeches while in the bathtub or dressing and undressing.
Read more >
-
B+ |
*** |
+2-1|
Teens & Up*
Just Like Heaven is the first Hollywood film since Return to Me that I would put in the same league as that earlier film, and that’s saying something.
Read more >
-
B+ |
*** |
+3|
Kids & Up
In 2003, Charlton Heston reprised his greatest role, if in voice only, in an animated made-for-TV version of Ben-Hur from the director and producers of the animated “Greatest Heroes and Legends of the Bible” series.
Read more >
-
B+ |
*** |
+2|
Kids & Up
The Greatest Game Ever Played is perhaps the most visually and emotionally dynamic film ever made about a game of golf — perhaps the most visually and emotionally dynamic possible film about a game of golf.
Read more >
-
B+ |
*** |
+3|
Teens & Up
Not to be confused with the identically named 1984 Herbert Wise film starring Albert Finney, Pope John Paul II is the first — so far the only — dramatic presentation to do anything like justice to the life and reign of the 20th century’s most popular pope.
Read more >
-
B+ |
*** |
+3|
Kids & Up*
One of the most magical effects in Andrew Adamson’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe isn’t rippling computer-generated fur, ice castles, or battle scenes. It’s the wide-eyed wonder and delight on the face of young Lucy Pevensie (Georgie Henley) as she passes beyond the wardrobe for the first time into the winter wonderland of the Narnian wood.
Read more >
-
B+ |
*** |
+2-1|
Teens & Up
The ongoing Hollywood deconstruction of Eisenhower-era American values hits a speed bump of sorts in The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio, a whimsical, stylish tribute to the wit and inner strength of a Donna Reed–esque housewife and mother of ten (Julianne Moore) whose bouyancy and creative flair holds her family together in spite of little help and indeed much resistance from her alcoholic, bullying husband (Woody Harrelson).
Read more >
-
B+ |
*** |
+3|
Kids & Up
Given the inherently less dramatic structure, The Passion of Bernadette doesn’t “tell a story” the way the original film does, but the portrait of Bernadette’s unassuming heroic sanctity and occasional tart rejoinders remains moving and worthwhile.
Read more >
-
B+ |
*** |
+1|
Kids & Up
Cars is Pixar’s most improbable success to date, a film that could easily have misfired, but somehow does not.
Read more >
-
B+ |
*** |
+1|
Kids & Up*
The themes are timeless and humane, and if the film isn’t always entirely persuasive, it earns enough viewer goodwill to make up the difference. Funny, visually sumptuous, and bittersweet, Riding Alone movingly suggests that it’s better not to.
Read more >
-
B+ |
*** |
-1|
Adults
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is the best name for a western of any film in history. It’s the second half of the title that does it — the editorial moralizing, redolent of a 19th-century dime novel or monograph. The kind of thing that boys like young Bob Ford eagerly devoured in their beds at night as they dreamed of being daring and admired like Jesse James.
Read more >
-
B+ |
*** |
+2-1|
Adults
Though not always faithful in small things, Things We Lost is faithful in much. The individual moments are sometimes off, but the large emotional resonances are right.
Read more >
-
B+ |
*** |
+2-1|
Teens & Up*
Lars Lindstrom goes through life doing his utmost not to. Every day he negotiates his world as an obstacle course, and the obstacles are other people. The awkwardness of proximity that many people feel in a crowded elevator as they avoid eye contact with strangers and put conversations on hold is how Lars feels with anybody, anywhere. You could say he is socially maladjusted, except I’m not sure he could be called anything with “socially” in it.
Read more >
-
B+ |
*** |
+2|
Teens & Up
In the end, Bella has something to challenge everyone, pro-life or otherwise. For pro-lifers, the inspiring ending represents a call to love of neighbor. It isn’t enough just to oppose abortion: We are called to love those in need with the love of Christ, potentially at a cost to ourselves. For those who favor abortion, the ending represents a challenge to recognize that life is a beautiful and precious gift even in far from ideal circumstances, and the choice to embrace life, even when it involves great sacrifice, is also beautiful.
Read more >
-
B+ |
*** |
+2|
Teens & Up
The title reflects the supporting role of Isaac Newton, played with gusto by Albert Finney, as a penitent ex-slave ship captain, now a mentor of sorts to Wilberforce as well as the writer of the beloved American hymn. (“A wretch like me,” Newton was not afraid to call himself in the original lyrics, with a biographical and theological honesty too direct for the revisionist vandals of hymnody responsible for many missalettes and hymnbooks.)
Read more >
-
B+ |
*** |
+1-1|
Teens & Up
Smart, sardonic and more than a little silly, Iron Man is a successful super-hero movie that never takes itself too seriously.
Read more >
-
B+ |
*** |
+1-1|
Teens & Up
After making his feature debut with the rather inspiration-challenged big-screen Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, director Garth Jennings wisely shifts to a more intimate and personal canvas with Son of Rambow, a quirky British indie, set in the early 1980s, that made a splash at Sundance. Although somewhat scattered and uneven, Rambow has enough heart and wit to sustain its 96-minute running time.
Read more >
-
B+ |
*** |
+1|
Kids & Up*
If the first Narnia film got perhaps two-thirds of Lewis’s intended meaning, Caspian is lucky if it gets a quarter. … The upshot is that Caspian is a good-looking fantasy film with some appealing eye candy and comparatively little to do with the book, beyond basic themes of good versus evil and rather generic faith. On that level, if you can put Lewis out of your mind, it’s a pretty good ride.
Read more >
-
B+ |
*** |
+0|
Kids & Up*
The action, though no more realistic than the most cartoony chop-socky movies, is really intense — too intense for sensitive youngsters. For kids up for rolling with the punches, though, Kung Fu Panda may just be DreamWorks Animation’s most entertaining and endearing CGI cartoon to date.
Read more >
-
B+ |
*** |
+1|
Kids & Up
Longtime Bean aficionados may find some of the gags familiar from the TV show and the earlier film. Others may feel (what seems plausible to me) that Atkinson has refined his act and given us “Bean’s Greatest Hits” in their ideal form, culminating in a delightful climax approaching feckless transcendence.
Read more >
-
B+ |
*** |
+2|
Kids & Up*
Here is a mouse-hero who is truly serious about honor, devotion and courage, in a movie that feels like a storybook rather than an action movie — a movie that, in addition to honor and devotion and courage, is also about longing, imagination, resentment, contrition, forgiveness and redemption. It’s also a trippy movie in which the kingdom of Dor celebrates the annual Soup Day festival like Mardi Gras in New Orleans, rain magically stops falling when the queen dies and a sort of magical food golem helps the royal chef create new soups.
Read more >
-
B+ |
*** |
+2-1|
Adults
Celebrated by fans as the “feel-good” film of 2008 and damned by skeptics as “poverty porn,” Best Picture winner Slumdog Millionaire is, I think, neither of these. It’s a wrenching fairy tale, a yarn rife with desperate want, loyalty and love, a fable of the vagaries of life that are often cruel but sometimes unexpectedly, sublimely kind.
Read more >
-
B+ |
*** |
+1|
Kids & Up
Although Ponyo seems as disjointed and free-floating as Howl’s Moving Castle, somehow the younger milieu here makes it more acceptable. Or maybe it’s just that there’s more here to latch onto emotionally.
Read more >
-
B+ |
*** |
+1|
Kids & Up
What’s the last family film you can think of that name-checked Nikola Tesla and Alexander Graham Bell? When in movie history has the girl ever revealed her true self and become more attractive to the hero by putting on spectacles and pulling back her hair?
Read more >
-
B+ |
*** |
+1|
Adults
Toward the end, the two storylines almost converge as Julie’s blog comes to Julia’s attention — and Julia’s reported response leaves Powell in tears. How that twist strikes you make depend in part on which storyline you have felt closer to, on whose movie it is for you. Either way, there’s something for everyone, and if there’s a couple of brief bedroom scenes, for once they involve happily married couples.
Read more >
-
B+ |
*** |
+1|
Teens & Up
Seaplanes combine Miyazaki’s twin gravity-defying loves of water and sky, flying and floating, as well as his affinity for vintage technology — and the movie’s haphazard, kitchen-sink style suggests that the director just wanted to kick back and have fun with this one. There are aerial dogfights, star-crossed romance, gorgeous scenery, a hat tip Fleischer-style vintage animation, a rip-roaring escape sequence set in Milan, a nightclub where enemies sit at adjacent tables like Rick’s in Casablanca and the proprietress sings torch songs, and a showdown between the titular hero and an American antagonist that plays like the ultimate Humphrey Bogart / Errol Flynn smackdown that never was.
Read more >
-
B+ |
*** |
+0|
Kids & Up*
“Vikings versus dragons” is definitely one of the cooler premises for a computer-animated tale to come along in a while. Differentiate the dragons into half a dozen distinct species, each with unique traits, from the roly-poly Gronkle to the two-headed Hideous Zippleback and the stealthy, jet-black Night Fury, and it’s even cooler — especially if the dragons are ordinary beasties rather than anthropomorphized talking monsters.
Read more >
-
B+ |
*** |
+2|
Teens & Up
Leigh Anne Tuohy (Sandra Bullock) is a red-state, family-values, guns-and-religion Erin Brockovich. Righteous, indomitable, unflappable, glamorous in plunging necklines and thigh-hugging skirts, she’s also a pistol-packing mama, a happily married homemaker and mother of two, a Bible-belt Evangelical and a dyed-in-the-wool gridiron junkie. She isn’t crass like Julia Roberts’ Oscar-winning part, but she’s as blunt and direct as an offensive tackle, and about as apt to be cowed by other people’s crass or intimidating behavior.
Read more >
-
B+ |
*** |
+1|
Teens & Up
His suit may be iron, but he’s still got feet of clay. Tony Stark may not be the same narcissistic jerk he was at the beginning of Iron Man two years ago, but that doesn’t mean he’s someone completely different either. The road to redemption is seldom so straight as that.
Read more >
-
B+ |
*** |
+2|
Kids & Up
Faithful to the spirit if not the letter of Beverly Cleary’s Ramona books, Ramona and Beezus borrows eclectically from multiple books rather than sticking to one, but gets right what most matters, above all Ramona herself.
Read more >
-
B+ |
Though the documentary plays like a “a day in the life” at the Vatican, National Geographic
filmmakers actually spent three months in Rome amassing footage and
interviews. The result is a well-rounded portrait, or series of
portraits, of Vatican life: Vignettes include the ordination of a
bishop, the restoration of a priceless tapestry, the swearing-in of a
Swiss Guard soldier, reception of world leaders, and a race to
digitally preserve disintegrating documents.
Read more >
-
B |
***½ |
+2-2|
Adults
To “rip open the inconsolable secret,” to
awaken the spiritual hunger for something beyond the
materialistic scope of our fragmented, desacrilized modern
existence, was the burden of Andrei Tarkovsky, cinematic poet
laureate of the Russian soul.
Read more >
-
B |
***½ |
-3|
Adults*
Be that as it may, scratch the surface of the vast body of
commentary and discussion devoted to The Matrix, and you
could start to get the impression that Morpheus’s comment is a
fairly accurate description of the film itself. The Matrix
has been described as everything from a neo-gnostic parable to a
Christian allegory, from a strikingly innovative action film to a
derivative rip-off of kung-fu clichés and stock anime
conventions. Commentators have found influences from Plato and
Descartes, Lewis Carroll and Star Wars. At the end of the day, can anyone really say what
The Matrix is?
Read more >
-
B |
***½ |
+2-2|
Adults*
Obviously, a Kaufman film called Eternal Sunshine of the
Spotless Mind isn’t going to be as cheerful and wholesome as
the title might suggest. Despair, isolation, and loneliness
continue to hang like a fog across his world. Eternal
Sunshine also resembles his other films in its characters’
milieu of general dissipation, casual sex, drug use, and so
on.
Read more >
-
B |
***½ |
-2|
Teens & Up*
Then re-anchor the story to reality by asking whether there
are really any ghosts at all — whether apparently spectral
manifestations might not in fact be no more than an unstable
woman’s imaginings, or the cruel pranks of a spiteful child, or
the malicious work of mysterious servants with unguessable
motives. Bear in mind that moviegoers are increasingly wise to
Sixth-Sense style tricks, and will carefully analyze each
of these characters in turn, trying to figure out what might not
be as it seems.
Read more >
-
B |
***½ |
-1|
Teens & Up*
Nathaniel was 11 when his father died in 1974 at the age of
73. Nathaniel’s film, made nearly 30 years later, represents both
an instrument and a chronicle of his efforts to explore who his
father really was, what legacy he left behind, and what it might
mean for his son. Part travelogue, part interview documentary,
part home movie, My Architect surveys the elder Kahn’s
most important buildings, from La Jolla’s Salk Institute to the
Exeter Library to the Bangadeshi capital, along the way
interviewing colleagues, peers, family members, even chance
acquaintances — anyone who might have light to shed on the
mystery of his father’s character and personality.
Read more >
-
B |
*** |
-1|
Adults
You can almost feel Martin Scorsese exorcising
the specter of Gangs of New York in the first act of The Aviator, another
leisurely two-hour, forty-five-minute exercise in lavish period
Americana starring Leonardo DiCaprio.
Read more >
-
B |
*** |
+2-2|
Adults
It’s not without faults. At times the satire
crosses over into silly farce, and, while the last act avoids the
most obvious clichés, it’s still a bit tidy. And some of the
film’s basic themes seem undermined by an unfortunate subplot
involving perplexing decisions by more than one character. But if
these faults can’t quite be overlooked, the film’s virtues are
rare enough to make the whole package worthwhile.
Read more >
-
B |
*** |
+0|
Kids & Up*
(Written by Jimmy Akin) SpongeBob SquarePants (Tom Kenny) is a sponge
who wears square pants and who lives in a town on the ocean floor
called Bikini Bottom (get it?). He’s also an ace crackerjack fry
cook in a greasy spoon called the Krusty Krab.
Read more >
-
B |
*** |
+0|
Teens & Up*
Overblown, overwrought, and overdone, Armageddon was a movie on overdrive, fueled by adrenaline and testosterone, lurching along in fits and starts. Eastwood’s film exudes easy charm and never takes itself too seriously; it runs on a slower-burning but higher-grade fuel: the likability and established audience goodwill of the four aging leads (Eastwood, Tommy Lee Jones, Donald Sutherland, and James Garner). Where Armageddon merely strutted, Cowboys swaggers. What’s the difference? Style.
Read more >
-
B |
*** |
+1|
Kids & Up*
One of the functions of fairy tales is to reflect in an
imaginative way truths that, were they presented literally,
children might not be ready for, but which they can on some level
apprehend and assimilate in this form, and be in some way more
prepared emotionally for life. Fairy tales help children grasp
what life expects of them, what dangers, adversities, and
opportunities they will face. From them children can begin to
learn the prudence to avoid the dangers, the fortitude to face
the adversities, and the enterprise to seize the
opportunities.
Read more >
-
B |
*** |
+1-2|
Teens & Up*
At the end of its 122 minutes, perhaps, few if any of the story’s various partial threads have really been resolved. Open-ended and somewhat scattered, The Namesake is generally engaging but feels elusively incomplete. One could say it is about the journey rather than the destination. A more disciplined approach to the screenplay might have distilled Lahiri’s 300-page novel into something more satisfyingly focused. Instead, frequent Nair collaborator Sooni Taraporevala chooses to sketch in and gesture at as much of the book as possible, trusting viewers to supply the rest.
Read more >
-
B |
*** |
-2|
Adults
So long is the shadow of The Iliad over the history of Western literature that before considering the merits of Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy it may be helpful to recall that the story of the Trojan War was not only likely told by poets long before Homer, certainly after Homer it has been retold and reworked by numerous poets and writers, including Virgil, Euripides, Quintus, Chaucer, and Shakespeare.
Read more >
-
B |
*** |
+2|
Kids & Up*
The story, originally set in 1880 but moved to 1914 for the
movie, concerns a sheltered young girl from a well-to-do family
who is called "Winifred" by her overprotective parents and
grandmother, and might be called "Winnie" by her friends if she
had any. Winnie (Alexis Bledel of TV’s "Gilmore Girls") is so
timid that when she decides to run away from home, she heads for
the family-owned woods adjacent to her house, never actually
setting foot off her parents’ property.
Read more >
-
B |
*** |
+1-1|
Teens & Up
If Pixar’s Toy Story movies connect with the child in all of us, DreamWorks’ Shrek pictures are aimed squarely at our inner adolescent. I suspect I may be more in touch with my inner child than my inner adolescent.
Read more >
-
B |
*** |
+0|
Teens & Up
Incidentally, DreamWorks’s Shrek and Shrek
2 were based on childhood fairy tales, roughly
corresponding to Pixar’s Toy
Story and Toy Story
2, which were about childhood playthings. This makes
Monsters, Inc. the only
Pixar film to date with no DreamWorks parallel (though November
will see a second, The Incredibles).
Read more >
-
B |
*** |
+0|
Kids & Up
Borrowing a page from Sleeping Beauty, therefore,
Levine came up with the central dramatic conceit of her Newbery
Honor-award winning book, Ella Enchanted: From her infancy
Ella has been under a fairy curse (here bestowed in cluelessness
rather than malice) obliging her to obey any imperative statement
directed at her, from anyone. The moral of the story, in the
author’s own words in interviews and letters to readers, is:
"Don’t be too obedient!"
Read more >
-
B |
*** |
+1-2|
Teens & Up
Where its predecessors felt a bit padded and overlong, The Prisoner of Azkaban feels incomplete and overly edited. If the first two films could easily have been tightened up by a half-hour or so, this one left me wishing for the first time that there were an “extended edition” DVD coming, as with the Lord of the Rings films.
Read more >
-
B |
*** |
+0|
Kids & Up*
(Written by Jimmy Akin) Treasure Planet is Robert Louis
Stevenson meets George Lucas. More specifically, it’s Treasure
Island meets The Phantom
Menace.
Read more >
-
B |
*** |
+1-1|
Teens & Up
Loosely based upon a story by children’s author William Steig (Sylvester and the Magic Pebble), Shrek is a satiric, updated fairy-tale love story, sort of like The Princess Bride, if André the Giant had been the hero, and had worn Lou Ferrigno body paint. And if Princess Buttercup did Matrix-style wire-fu and knocked out bad guys.
Read more >
-
B |
*** |
+1-1|
Kids & Up*
In the end, though, Secondhand Lions is a pleasant and entertaining film that’s neither as demanding nor as satisfying as the superior Holes. The setup promises more early conflict than the first act delivers, and the story-arc doesn’t give the protagonist enough to do. Beyond that, the film gestures at moral lessons it never quite fleshes out or illustrates, and what ought to have been a key plot point is relegated to a tacked-on coda, depriving it of the crucial significance it should have had.
Read more >
-
B |
*** |
+0|
Kids & Up*
(Written by Jimmy Akin) When Cartoons Collide!!! That’s what they could have used as a tag-line for Rugrats Go Wild.
Read more >
-
B |
*** |
+1-2|
Adults
Then, after three days of rehearsals, I thought it would be
fun to actually graduate.
Read more >
-
B |
*** |
+2-1|
Teens & Up
Pope John Paul II gets the A&E “Biography” treatment in Pope John Paul II — Statesman of Faith, a 50-minute documentary made in 1993 focusing particularly on the Holy Father’s crusades against totalitarianism and violence.
Read more >
-
B |
*** |
+1-2|
Teens & Up
Fans of the books will be gratified by a warm rush of recognition at every turn. From the growing anticipation as the mysterious invitations to Harry at the Dursley’s begin their inexorable multiplication, to Robbie Coltrane’s comforting performance as the genial giant Hagrid, to the dazzling Hogwarts grounds, to the exhilarating speed and excitement of Quidditch, the book’s main pleasures have been expertly realized.
Read more >
-
B |
*** |
+3|
Kids & Up
Joseph’s own dreams — the two biblical ones plus an extra one — are the best; I caught my breath at the first glimpse of these
dreams, which look like living, flowing Van Goghs. The dream-sky
swirls like Starry Night, and the grass ripples under the
dream-Joseph’s feet like ripples in a pond. The dreamlike quality
of these sequences is undeniable and memorable.
Read more >
-
B |
*** |
+2-2|
Adults
Watching Erin take on corporate ruthlessness and professional
apathy, I often felt that while I couldn’t always condone her
choice of words, I appreciated the spirit behind them — not to
mention the effect they had on her hapless victims. This movie
makes you feel that one person really can make a difference;
especially since it’s based on a true story.
Read more >
-
B |
*** |
+0|
Kids & Up
Read more >
-
B |
*** |
+1|
Kids & Up
With Piglet’s Big Movie, Pooh finally returns to his
roots, bringing three of Milne’s original tales to the screen for
the first time in an anthology-style story. Framed as a series of
flashbacks in a story with Pooh and his friends searching for the
missing Piglet, the movie recalls the tales of Christopher
Robin’s expedition to the North Pole, the house at Pooh Corner,
and the arrival of Kanga and Roo in the Hundred Acre Wood.
Running through all three episodes as well as the framing story
is the film’s unifying theme, little Piglet’s big heart and
heroism.
Read more >
-
B |
*** |
+0|
Kids & Up
(Written by Jimmy Akin) Changes are coming to the pastel-colored
Rugrats universe, and The Rugrats Movie brings
them. It is the biggest things that has happened to the series in
its nearly ten year run: a new Rugrat is being born.
Read more >
-
B |
*** |
+1-2|
Adults
Seabiscuit canters handsomely around
the track less like a scrappy race horse than a slightly overfed
show horse, playing to the crowd, confident that there’s no real
competition breathing down its neck. It is right.
Read more >
-
B |
*** |
+0|
Teens & Up
Besides satirizing Star Trek’s fan base, Galaxy Quest also takes aim both at the absurdities of the show itself and also at the behind-the-scenes reality. Most of the obvious Trek conventions are targeted: the principle that any extraneous character on an away mission always dies; the shipwide crisis that requires crew members to crawl through endless ducts; the isolation of the captain on a hostile planet where he must do hand-to-hand combat with an alien monster.
Read more >
-
B |
*** |
+1-2|
Teens & Up
Harry Potter is back, and in this second outing the stakes are higher, the themes darker, the Malfoys nastier, the action grander, the monsters scarier, the gross-outs ickier, the climax stronger, and the movie longer.
Read more >
-
B |
*** |
-1|
Adults
Thanks to the skills of director Patrice
Leconte, L’Homme du train (Man on the Train) would
have made an excellent silent film, except that we would have
missed the enchanting tones of Jean Rochefort’s retired poetry
teacher, Monsieur Manesquier. Manesquier talks like a schoolboy
who has yet to leave behind his school days — his rich words and
phrases touch on his dreams and wishes, and are charmingly tinged
with sexual innuendo and self-deprecation. Rochefort’s
characterization is perfectly complemented by Johnny Hallyday’s
stoic career criminal, Milan, who responds to questions with
either silence or sapient, terse words.
Read more >
-
B |
*** |
+2|
Teens & Up
He’s overly pedantic: Instead of merely urging a student to
stay off the grass, he exhorts, "Walk where the great men who
have gone before you have walked" — not just because it’s good
for the grass, but "because it’s good for you."
Read more >
-
B |
*** |
+1-2|
Teens & Up*
When
his supply of meds unexpectedly dries up, Roy predictably
disintegrates, much to Frank’s concern. Soon, though, Roy is seeing a
psychiatrist (Bruce Altman, Changing Lanes),
who not only provides the medication he needs, but gets him talking and
thinking about his life — in particular the woman who walked out on him
fourteen years ago, and whether or not she was pregnant at the time.
Read more >
-
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.
Read more >
-
B |
*** |
+1|
Teens & Up
Writer-director Douglas McGrath, who previously adapted and
directed the charming 1996 version of Emma, does a respectable
job of retelling as much of Dickens’ tale as possible in the time
alloted. The casting is generally very good, with Christopher
Plummer as the heartless, well-to-do uncle Ralph Nickleby, Jim
Broadbent as the squinting, leering Squeers of horrific Dotheboys
Hall, and Juliet Stevenson as his equally terrible wife.
Read more >
-
B |
*** |
+1-1|
Teens & Up*
Gunplay is largely restricted to a single, lengthy sequence;
and, where in a typical action movie thousands of bullets might
be expended without anyone in the audience batting an eye, in
this film every bullet counts, and the viewer feels its
impact.
Read more >
-
B |
*** |
+1-1|
Teens & Up
In particular, his investigation focuses, not on any of the
relics of the True Cross itself, but on a wooden relic purported
to be a fragment of the titulus crucis — the placard
placed over the head of the crucified man bearing the charge
against him, in this case "Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews."
For centuries this relic has been housed at the Santa Croce
Church in Rome, where tradition holds it was brought by the
mother of Constantine, St. Helena, following her pilgrimage to
the Holy Land in search of Christian artifacts. However, these
claims had not been critically investigated prior to Thiede’s
research.
Read more >
-
B |
*** |
-2|
Teens & Up*
Yet against all odds, T3 is a smart, rousing extension
of Cameron’s paranoid fantasy that not only meshes seamlessly
with the past and future continuities of the earlier films, but
actually advances and develops the series’ apocalyptic mythology.
Read more >
-
B |
*** |
+2-2|
Adults
A line in the trailer for The Exorcism of Emily Rose, felicitously cut from the final film, observes that “There’s no pill for the devil.” More to the point, there’s no diagnostic test or scan for him, either.
Read more >
-
B |
*** |
+0|
Teens & Up
As deadpan as its affectless protagonist, breakout indie phenomenon Napoleon Dynamite is like a Roschach test of viewer empathy.
Read more >
-
B |
*** |
-1|
Adults
If it isn’t the brilliant film it could have been, Déjà Vu still contains enough flashes of that film to make it entertaining while you’re watching it. On reflection, though, it feels a bit like a shell game in which the conjurer himself has lost track of where the pea is supposed to be.
Read more >
-
B |
*** |
+1-1|
Teens & Up
The fourth of seven projected films based on J. K. Rowling’s ongoing adventures of the boy wizard, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire represents the midpoint of the series and of Harry’s schooling at Hogwarts School of Wizardry and Witchcraft.
Read more >
-
B |
*** |
+0|
Teens & Up*
Peter Jackson’s King Kong is one of those mad movies, like Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge! or Tim Burton’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, that fully justifies and deserves all the best and worst that can be said for or against them.
Read more >
-
B |
*** |
+0|
Kids & Up
The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill is the third intriguing nature documentary of 2005, a charming sleeper hit that focuses like March of the Penguins on the life challenges faced by a population of exotic birds, and also, like Grizzly Man, on an eccentric California man’s intimate involvement in their lives.
Read more >
-
B |
*** |
+2-1|
Teens & Up
Up to a point, there is a level of artistic kinship between The New World, Terence Malick’s dreamlike origin myth of the American colonies, and another recent, visually poetic meditation on a foundation story: Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ.
Read more >
-
B |
*** |
+2-2|
Adults*
Crash is a provocation, an insistent manifesto that filters every scene and almost every line of dialogue through the prism of race, but keeps turning the prism around and around until the colors no longer matter and we see only what the characters do.
Read more >
-
B |
*** |
-1|
Adults
Inside Man opens with a challenge from criminal mastermind Dalton Russell (Clive Owen) to the viewer to try to keep up as he lays out the labyrinthine details of his perfect crime. “Pay strict attention to what I say, because I choose my words carefully, and I never repeat myself,” he warns with smug complacency.
Read more >
-
B |
*** |
+2|
Kids & Up*
Starring Anton Rodgers as an avuncular Lewis at home in Oxford in 1963, the year that he died, the short film cuts between Lewis’s running commentary on the events of his life and flashback dramatizations of those events.
Read more >
-
B |
*** |
+1|
Kids & Up
Over the Hedge may satirize suburban foibles, but that doesn’t mean family audiences need to see themselves as the target. Who really likes plastic flamingos, anyway?
Read more >
-
B |
*** |
+1-1|
Teens & Up
In a way, Monster House is a bracingly icy breath of fresh air, a tween-oriented family film that is unabashedly out to frighten.
Read more >
-
B |
*** |
-1|
Adults
A moody, atmospheric fairy tale, The Illusionist is the story of one illusionist — Eisenheim, a fictional turn-of-the-last-century magician — being told by another, writer-director Neil Burger ( Interview with the Assassin).
Read more >
-
B |
*** |
-1|
Adults
The Illusionist is essentially a rationalized fairy tale with a hero, a villain, a princess, and true love. The Prestige — like Nolan’s earlier puzzle movie, the celebrated Memento — is a brilliantly interconnected but chilly mechanism in which each element is a carefully integrated part of the whole, but the effect of the whole is somewhat alienating.
Read more >
-
B |
*** |
+1-1|
Adults
Even today, the iconic, Pulitzer-winning 1945 photograph of five US Marines and a Navy corpman raising the American flag on Iwo Jima retains an extraordinary power. Like a Norman Rockwell painting, Joe Rosenthal’s famous photograph tells a story, creates a mood, evokes an ethos, and elicits a metaphorical or allegorical response, all at the same time.
Read more >
-
B |
*** |
+0|
Kids & Up
If Flushed Away doesn’t reach the heights of demented genius of The Curse of the Were-Rabbit or even the lesser charms of Chicken Run, it’s still got a goofy inventiveness that puts it in the better half of this year’s crop of CGI films.
Read more >
-
B |
*** |
+1-1|
Teens & Up
The level of magical eye candy is noticeably lower than previous installments… On the other hand, Ron and Hermione, though probably short-changed compared to the book, are better used here than in the previous film. Best of all is Harry’s leading role in Dumbledore’s Army, marking a major advance in proactive engagement from a protagonist who for too much of the first four chapters has been largely passive.
Read more >
-
B |
*** |
+1-2|
Adults*
It is a truism that every childbirth is a miracle. Children of Men sets that truism in sharp relief, envisioning a world in which a single ordinary conception, pregnancy and childbirth seems almost as miraculous — and portentous — as a virgin birth.
Read more >
-
B |
*** |
-1|
Teens & Up*
Wisely, Live Free doesn’t try to replicate the paranoia or intimidation of the first film. Twenty years later, battered by life, John can no longer be that panicky, brash cop, and Live Free shrewdly uses his history to advantage, establishing him as a dogged, world-weary old warrior who may still get mad and even desperate, but can’t really get all that frightened any more.
Read more >
-
B |
*** |
-1|
Teens & Up*
Directed by Helen Whitney (“John Paul II – The Millennial Pope”), “The Mormons” is at once as scrupulously respectful and sympathetic as any religious adherent might hope for in such a treatment, while also dealing directly and fairly with thorny subjects from Joseph Smith’s evolving accounts of his religious experiences to the Mountain Meadow Massacre of 120 travelers by Utah Mormons and the subsequent church cover-up.
Read more >
-
B |
*** |
+2-1|
Teens & Up*
As the name implies, Caramel is a gooey, insubstantial confection, often sweet, occasionally cloying, sometimes sticky — in many respects about on a par with the likes of Beauty Shop. The humor is broad, characters stereotypical, the situations formulaic. Yet there’s no good–bad character divide, no requisite A‑story conflict, and few tidy resolutions.
Read more >
-
B |
*** |
+1|
Teens & Up
If I had to put Be Kind Rewind in a box, which is emphatically not where any Gondry film belongs, I might be tempted to call it Lars and the Real Girl by way of Bowfinger — the latter for its comic guerrilla filmmaking, but the former for its similarity of spirit, its gentle absurdism in an ode to benevolence and community togetherness.
Read more >
-
B |
*** |
+0|
Teens & Up
Raiders of the Lost Ark is such a tour de force homage to the serial adventures of yesteryear that viewers who know nothing of those old cliffhangers are swept up in its nostalgia. Kingdom of the Crystal Skull plays to nostalgia for the earlier Indiana Jones films. In that capacity, it delivers more or less what one would expect, disposable popcorn entertainment and a reunion with a few old friends. Enjoy it for what it is, but don’t hope for more.
Read more >
-
B |
*** |
+2|
Kids & Up
Kit Kittredge: An American Girl is worth seeing in the company of any American girl young enough to watch a G-rated movie in which the protagonist wants to be a reporter rather than get a makeover, become a pop princess or get the cute boy. If you can get away without shelling out for the matching dress, so much the better.
Read more >
-
B |
*** |
-1|
Teens & Up*
Bigger effects and badder creatures make Del Toro’s second take on Hellboy more entertaining than the original, but something’s still missing in the story of the super hero from hell.
Read more >
-
B |
*** |
+2|
Teens & Up*
It’s a slightly heavy-handed misstep in a film that runs confidently though unevenly over a mountain of material, stepping right more often than it steps wrong over its 160 minutes. As a contribution and challenge to the World War II genre, Miracle at St. Anna compares reasonably well to most Hollywood efforts. As is often the case, Lee seems to relish biting off more than he can chew, and the ambition and scope of this effort is worth the bits that don’t quite fit.
Read more >
-
B |
*** |
+1-1|
Teens & Up
Potter fans, whether they’ve kept up with the books or not, will find that the latest film continues the trajectories of recent installments — it’s darker, more tragic and more romantic — while setting the stage for the final battle, now planned for two movies.
Read more >
-
B |
*** |
-1|
Teens & Up*
The press called her a “lady pilot,” but Amelia Earhart called herself a “tramp flyer.” She seems to have preferred “flyer” to “pilot”; perhaps it was just a manner of speech, or perhaps it was the sky she cared about more than the airplane, the act of flying rather than the mechanics of manning an aircraft. The other word she liked was “vagabonding.” As imagined in Amelia, Mira Nair’s handsome biopic, Earhart craves freedom above all: “no borders, only horizons.”
Read more >
-
B |
*** |
+1|
Kids & Up*
It’s almost a shock to hear the words “Christ the Savior is born” in a big-budget Hollywood movie today, even a time-honored period piece like A Christmas Carol. Only five years ago, Zemekis’ own The Polar Express rang with “Silver Bells” and “Deck the Halls,” but not so much as a “rum pa pum pum” from the stable at Bethlehem (not even at Santa’s North Pole home, where everyone celebrates Christmas).
Read more >
-
B |
*** |
+0|
Teens & Up
Jean-Marc Vallée’s The Young Victoria is frothy, spirited and fairly inconsequential. I like that about it.
Read more >
-
B |
*** |
+2-2|
Kids & Up*
There’s a villain with magical powers — but instead of Disneyfied magic, like Aladdin’s friendly genie, the film’s New Orleans voodoo is an occult world of terrifying powers and principalities in which the villain himself is at much at risk as anyone. It’s almost Disney’s most overtly Christian depiction of magic and evil at least since Sleeping Beauty, if not ever — though the waters are muddied by a benevolent, swamp-dwelling hoodoo mama in a sort of fairy-godmother role.
Read more >
-
B |
*** |
+2|
Kids & Up*
After three Shrek films aimed squarely at adolescents, I’m mildly surprised to find that DreamWorks has made a final chapter aimed more or less at middle-aged men, and specifically husbands and fathers. You know, undemanding middle-aged men going to a Shrek movie. But still.
Read more >
-
B |
*** |
+2|
Kids & Up
To his suburban neighbors, Gru is a grumpy bald guy whose house looks like the Haunted Mansion and whose ride makes the Dark Knight’s Batmobile look like a Prius. He’s the one who makes tasteless “jokes” about killing your dog if it goes on his lawn again and pretends not to be home when girls come around selling cookies. You know the type.
Read more >
-
B |
*** |
+0|
Kids & Up*
The first good thing about The Sorcerer’s Apprentice is that it isn’t called The Sorcerer’s Apprentice: Oath of the Dragon Ring or The Sorcerer’s Apprentice: Nesting Dolls of Doom.
Read more >
-
B |
**½ |
+3|
Kids & Up
“Ordinary girl. Extraordinary soul” is the tagline of Thérèse, Catholic actor-director Leonardo Defilippis’s reverent, uplifting, straightforward biopic of the Little Flower. Of the tagline’s two clauses, the film’s special burden seems to be the first part, “ordinary girl.”
Read more >
-
B |
**½ |
+3|
Kids & Up
Almost thirty years ago Olivia Hussey played the most venerated woman of all time, the Virgin Mary, in Zeffirelli’s “Jesus of Nazareth.” Now she portrays the most revered woman of the twentieth century in the reverential, Italian-made English-language production Mother Teresa.
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-
B |
**½ |
+2|
Teens & Up
Beyond the Gates is most worth seeing for its uncompromising portrait of a more representative episode in the Rwandan genocide than the events depicted in Hotel Rwanda. At the same time, it offers little insight into the Hutu or Tutsi experience.
Read more >
-
B |
** |
+3|
Teens & Up
Like its heroine Jamie, A Walk to Remember is pious, wholesome, and eminently open to mockery and derision. Also like its heroine, it doesn’t care what people think of it.
Read more >
-
B- |
**** |
-2|
Teens & Up*
A.I. is a science-fiction fairy tale: a terrible, revisionistic revisiting of "Pinocchio," the story of the little manmade boy who wants to be real — as told by a nihilist who condemns Gepetto for creating Pinocchio, the world for laughing at him, and the Blue Fairy for leading him on when he’s better off being made of wood, which will after all be around long after Gepetto is pushing up daisies.
Read more >
-
B- |
***½ |
-2|
Adults*
Like the similarly acclaimed Moulin Rouge!, Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amélie is a whimsical, hyperactive, self-aware, lavishly overdesigned fantasy-romance, set in a retro, fairy-tale Paris, about a tender young idealist who falls in love with a sex-industry employee — but there the similarities end.
Read more >
-
B- |
*** |
+1|
Kids & Up*
And no one but Burton could possibly have thought it would be
a good idea to give candymaker extraordinaire Willy Wonka (Depp)
unresolved issues from childhood stemming from a traumatic
relationship with his dentist father (Christopher Lee!), leaving
Wonka unable to say the words "family" or "parents," and subject
to disorienting childhood flashbacks. When the book’s climax and
denouement have played out, and the credits should be rolling any
minute now, and the film suddenly invents additional obstacles to
delay the hero’s reward, then cuts to a scene with the other most
prominent character on a psychiatrist’s couch, can there be any
doubt that the film has gone off the rails?
Read more >
-
B- |
*** |
+2-2|
Adults*
Director Ridley Scott made his name with the groundbreaking
science-fiction films Blade Runner and Alien, both
of which, like Gladiator, were triumphs of set design and
visual style, memorable more for the haunting worlds they created
than for any engaging character development or moral interest. In
these earlier films, Scott had the advantage of showing us worlds
we had never seen before. Gladiator takes us to familiar
territory, though new computer effects and Scott’s strong
direction make it worth seeing anyway.
Read more >
-
B- |
*** |
+2-2|
Adults*
A pity it’s not a brilliant film, only a pretty entertaining
one. If it had been just a bit stronger, it could have offered a
moral counterpart to the acclaimed but cold-hearted Beauty; as it is, it provides an
interesting counterpoint. The Ref has its moments, and
they’re funny moments, but the film’s premise had potential that
was never quite realized. The premise is a peach, though. That,
and crackling performances from the three leads, make The
Ref worth watching — unless of course you don’t care for
black comedy of any sort, or the crass language that can
accompany it.
Read more >
-
B- |
*** |
+0|
Kids & Up*
(Written by Jimmy Akin) Elves love to tell stories, or so Papa Elf
(Bob Newhart) tells us at the beginning of this elf story. It is
an unusual tale in that it is the other side of all the
changeling stories that have circulated in folklore for
centuries. Instead of being the tale of a fairy raised among
mankind, it is the story of a human raised among elves.
Read more >
-
B- |
*** |
+2-2|
Adults*
Two things The Patriot isn’t are cynical or ironic. It’s corny, yes, and manipulative, not to mention clichéd, sentimental, and platitudinous. But at least it believes in its clichés and sentiments and platitudes. Its convictions may be half-baked, but it has the courage of them.
Read more >
-
B- |
*** |
+0|
Teens & Up
A Knight’s Tale is the kind of silly feel-good popcorn
movie, like Independence Day or the 1999 The Mummy,
that film critics generally enjoy ripping apart, and mainstream
audiences generally just enjoy.
Read more >
-
B- |
*** |
-2|
Adults
“It’s kind of difficult to explain,” CIA operative
Nathan Muir (Robert Redford) hedges with a wry smile. It may be the
most straightforward piece of information anyone gets from him in the
entire film.
Read more >
-
B- |
*** |
-2|
Adults*
Though constructed as an action-oriented thriller, the film’s
centerpiece is a wrenching glimpse of a scenario that may be in
our nation’s future, depicted in a way that’s neither
sensationalized nor minimized.
Read more >
-
B- |
*** |
+0|
Kids & Up
(Written by Jimmy Akin) The second Rugrats movie begins with a wedding: little Tommy Pickles’ widowed grandfather, Lou, is finally marrying his late-in-life flame, Lulu.
Read more >
-
B- |
*** |
-2|
Adults*
Now, with Red Dragon, based on the novel in which
Lecter first appeared, the series has come full circle. In
Silence, we saw Lecter escape from prison; here we see him
captured by FBI profiler Will Graham (Ed Norton, The
Score). While the humorous note introduced by Hannibal
continues to be a factor, an effective prelude reestablishes
Lecter as a frightening psychopath who’s willing to kill innocent
and likeable characters.
Read more >
-
B- |
*** |
+2-2|
Adults
Despite being more of the "Yo" than "Ya" persuasion, I think
I’m pretty receptive toward what are commonly called "chick
flicks." After all, my wife and I enjoy the same "guy movies";
why shouldn’t we enjoy the same romances and other
female-targeted films?
Read more >
-
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.
Read more >
-
B- |
*** |
+1-1|
Adults*
Phone Booth takes the formula of
Die Hard and Speed, in
which the protagonist is trapped in a confined space by a wily
psychopath with whom he communicates only by phone (or
walkie-talkie), to its narrowest physical dimensions yet.
Read more >
-
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.
Read more >
-
B- |
*** |
+0|
Teens & Up
Meg Ryan and Tim Robbins are cast somewhat against type: Ryan
often plays bubbleheaded and Robbins brainy, but here Ryan is a
science whiz, if a bubbly one, while Robbins is a grease monkey,
if a thoughtful one. The real twist, though, is that Catherine
(Ryan) happens to be the niece of Albert Einstein — and, while
she has a brainy fiancé, he’s a twit, and her uncle Albert
decides that she really needs someone like Ed.
Read more >
-
B- |
*** |
+1-1|
Adults
Who was Timothy Treadwell, the “grizzly man” whose thirteen-year love affair with Alaska’s brown bears came to a tragic end in the fall of 2003 when a hungry brown killed and partially ate him and his girlfriend?
Read more >
-
B- |
*** |
-1|
Adults
For an hour or so it threatens to be one of the best movies of the year, but in the end, despite sci‑fi razzle-dazzle and some undeniably powerful images, Sunshine ultimately settles for puzzling rather than mysterious.
Read more >
-
B- |
*** |
-1|
Adults
Ferocious car chases, rooftop pursuits, brutal combat sequences, elegantly choreographed stunts, a parade of exotic locations… Quantum does all this, with credible panache. Just don’t expect to care like you did in Casino.
Read more >
-
B- |
*** |
-2|
Teens & Up*
Salt is tasty in moderation, though you wouldn’t want to make it a big part of your diet.
Read more >
-
B- |
**½ |
+0|
Teens & Up
Now Nair’s compatriot Gurinder Chadha (Bend It Like Beckham) takes a
much more thoroughgoing approach to Pride and Prejudice,
going so far as to tweak the title to telegraph that this is Jane
Austen gone Bollywood with a capital B — i.e., Bride and
Prejudice.
Read more >
-
B- |
**½ |
+2|
Kids & Up*
Why has young David (Ben Tibber) spent most of
his short life in a Bulgarian labor camp? He doesn’t know, and
neither do we. As the title suggests, I Am David wants us
to experience David’s story through the eyes of a young boy who
has never known anything but this camp, except for a few
flashbulb memories of a fair-haired woman he knew in another
life.
Read more >
-
B- |
**½ |
+0|
Teens & Up
If you prefer movie reviews about pleasant and uplifting films in which goodness is suitably rewarded, evil is suitably punished, and children are not placed in excessive peril or disagreeable circumstances, you may wish to read some other review.
Read more >
-
B- |
**½ |
-1|
Kids & Up*
Nicolas Cage stars as heir to a family of treasure hunters
seeking the riches of King Solomon’s temple, discovered by the
Crusaders and hidden by the Knights Templar and the Freemasons,
who planted clues on the back of the Declaration of
Independence.
Read more >
-
B- |
**½ |
+1-1|
Kids & Up*
It’s not just that the banter and camaraderie of Luke and Han and Leia was so much more fun than the often wearying interactions of Anakin and Amidala and young Obi-Wan — though that’s part of it. More importantly, the stories themselves largely lack the strong center of good versus evil that was the heart of the original trilogy.
Read more >
-
B- |
**½ |
+2|
Teens & Up
It doesn’t help that this is now the second Star Wars movie in a row in which the "wars" alluded to in the series title are still basically in the future (one climactic skirmish aside). Lucas should never have gotten bogged down in political debate, let alone given two whole films of it.
Read more >
-
B- |
**½ |
+2|
Teens & Up
Signs has the
heart that was lacking in Unbreakable, but stumbles badly
in its treatment of the paranormal, in this case the world of
"X-Files" / "Twilight Zone" sci-fi. Glaring
practical problems increasingly sap the movie’s plausibility,
until eventually suspension of disbelief becomes possible only by
not thinking about it.
Read more >
-
B- |
**½ |
+1-1|
Adults
Arnold Schwarzeneggar’s latest vehicle brings us to a rather well-realized, not-too-distant future ("sooner than you think" according to an ominous caption) in which human cloning is possible but forbidden by "sixth-day laws" (so called after the sixth day of creation week in Genesis 1, the day when God created man).
Read more >
-
B- |
**½ |
+2-1|
Teens & Up*
In a society of rigid social codes and expectations that place
more emphasis on duty than self-fulfillment and in which even
holding hands between spouses is considered risqué, there is
considerable intrigue in the protagonist’s unconventional,
potentially profoundly embarrassing behavior.
Read more >
-
B- |
**½ |
+2|
Adults
A strongly Catholic milieu is a
mixed blessing. On the one hand, there are church weddings, baptisms,
funerals, and Christmas Masses. On the other hand, the hero and heroine
(Jacinda Barrett), who will later marry and have children, wind up in
bed after a night of heavy drinking, and a borderline sacrilegious
hazing stunt simulates the sacrament of penance. Ladder 49
doesn’t ask us to accept its characters as saints, but it does argue
that, whatever their faults, they deserve to be honored as heroes.
Read more >
-
B- |
**½ |
+1|
Kids & Up
Competently directed by Gary Winick (13 Going on 30), the film basically sticks to the plot of the book, and the story’s essential charm is echoed in the film. At the same time, the film also dumbs down White with excursions into gimmicky broad humor and bestiary slapstick — something the makers of Babe found unnecessary to do.
Read more >
-
B- |
**½ |
+2|
Teens & Up
Read more >
-
B- |
**½ |
+0|
Kids & Up*
Less than a month after Fox’s dumb, trashy Fantastic Four somehow passed itself off as a family-friendly superhero comedy comes Disney’s Sky High, a film that actually fits the bill.
Read more >
-
B- |
**½ |
+2|
Teens & Up
Where Paul Greengrass’s brilliant United 93 crafted a documentary-like anatomy of events without presuming to get inside people’s heads or explain actions or motivations, World Trade Center is a more conventional Hollywood film, with dramatic dialogue, characters following clearly plotted arcs, and a swelling soundtrack to reinforce the mood.
Read more >
-
B- |
**½ |
+1|
Kids & Up
As a memorial, Everyone’s Hero is a little, well, forgettable — old-fashioned, sweet, but ultimately disposable family fare with echoes of better films from Toy Story to The Iron Giant.
Read more >
-
B- |
**½ |
+1-1|
Kids & Up*
Like the full-sized rocket in Charlie’s barn, the Polishes’ film looks every inch what it seems to be. It’s been compared to a Frank Capra film, though it lacks the dark undercurrent and comedic edge that give Capra’s films their heft and stature.
Read more >
-
B- |
**½ |
+1|
Kids & Up*
As with Walden’s recent Charlotte’s Web, the key points of the book are here, for the most part, but hampered by irrelevant “family film” clutter — in this case unmagical fantasy sequences jarringly at odds with the story’s most significant plot point.
Read more >
-
B- |
**½ |
+0|
Kids & Up
Arctic Tale is co-presented by National Geographic Films, which released March of the Penguins, and Paramount Classics, which released An Inconvenient Truth, and when it grows up Arctic Tale would like to be both of those films.
Read more >
-
B- |
**½ |
+0|
Teens & Up
Although most viewers will probably find The Incredible Hulk diverting but — after a strong first act — forgettable entertainment, for Hulk fans smarting from the limitations of the Ang film, it may just be balm for the soul.
Read more >
-
B- |
**½ |
+0|
Teens & Up
The story wobbles between plotlines and characters that make emotional sense and ones that don’t. And the climax (hastily rewritten and reshot mere weeks before opening day) is pretty much unsalvageable. In Spielberg and Hanks’s professional hands the whole package remains passably entertaining, but much of it doesn’t bear thinking about afterwards — not because the premise is implausible, but because, granted the premise, characters do things that no one would, or should, do under those circumstances.
Read more >
-
B- |
**½ |
+1|
Teens & Up*
The Soloist is a story about a relationship across a socioeconomic chasm. Steve Lopez (Robert Downey Jr.) and Nathaniel Ayers (Jamie Foxx) have absolutely nothing in common, unless you count a propensity for stringing words together — which doesn’t count, because Lopez gets paid for it by the Los Angeles Times, while Ayers’ disjointed, rambling volubility is largely incomprehensible.
Read more >
-
B- |
**½ |
+1-2|
Adults
Writer–director Max Mayer gets a lot right about Asperger syndrome, or AS, from Adam’s verbal literalism and scrupulous honesty to his difficulty gauging emotions in others and assessing what is socially acceptable or not; from his difficulty with eye contact to his driving fascination with a narrow range of topics and cultivation of extensive knowledge and technical vocabulary on those topics.
Read more >
-
B- |
**½ |
-1|
Teens & Up
Harry Potter meets Clash of the Titans in Percy Jackson & The Olympians: The Lightning Thief, the first installment of Rick Riordan’s fantasy pentalogy, directed by Chris Columbus (Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets). The target audience for Percy Jackson & The Olympians has never seen Clash of the Titans, of course (I mean the original Clash of the Titans, of course, not the coming remake). That they have seen Harry Potter goes without saying.
Read more >
-
B- |
**½ |
+1|
Teens & Up
This Karate Kid may not be competing at the same level as the original, but it respects the tradition, and if it doesn’t really have anything new to say, it still says it in a reasonably engaging way.
Read more >
-
C+ |
***½ |
-1|
Teens & Up*
Such “hope” as Shyamalan has to offer is less
persuasive and less memorable than the fears and horrors he
conjures; the overall impression created by his film is an
ultimately dehumanizing, depressing one.
Read more >
-
C+ |
***½ |
-1|
Adults
It’s this dynamic that Altman is really interested in, not
“whodunit.” Or, if Altman does care whodunit, it’s only insofar as the
answer illuminates the film’s real themes of snobbery and resentment,
exploitation and interdependence, privilege and privation.
Read more >
-
C+ |
***½ |
+1-2|
Adults*
Gibson is a consummate filmmaker, and the action is never less than riveting. Yet as the film repeatedly ratchets up the wince factor beyond what seems necessary or appropriate, it’s hard not to feel that suffering has been reduced to spectacle.
Read more >
-
C+ |
*** |
+0|
Kids & Up
Return to Never Land is Peter Pan Lite,
if I can say that without conjuring images of low-fat peanut
butter.
Read more >
-
C+ |
*** |
+1-2|
Adults*
Regarding Punch-Drunk Love, much has been made of the
sense of not knowing what’s going to happen next. Anderson’s
opening scene is like a manifesto of unpredictability. Opening
with a phone conversation in a stark warehouse space, the scene
follows Barry Egan (Sandler) outdoors, where the morning waits in
expectant silence for the day to begin, as the audience waits for
the movie to begin. What kind of day will it be? What sort of
movie are we watching?
Read more >
-
C+ |
*** |
-2|
Adults*
The making of Nosferatu — the first (if unauthorized)
film version of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and one of the 45
films on the Vatican
film list — has passed into legend. Denied rights to
Dracula by Stoker’s widow, German director F. W. Murnau
simply had an adapted screenplay written with alternate character
names: Count Dracula became "Count Orlock," Jonathan Harker
became "Thomas Hutter," and so on. (Substantial changes were so
minimal that at least one English-language edition actually
restores Stoker’s original names in the title cards.)
Read more >
-
C+ |
*** |
-2|
Adults
Tortilla Soup isn’t the delicacy that Eat Drink Man
Woman was, nor does it compare with the exquisite meals
prepared by the patriarchs of either film. But on the level of
comfort food this remake is enjoyable enough, unless of course
you’re a purist conoisseur like Martin. Watching it, I laughed
out loud any number of times, and so did others in the
theater.
Read more >
-
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.
Read more >
-
C+ |
*** |
+1-2|
Adults*
The original 1971 Willard, a nasty
B-grade horror flick about an oppressed misfit whose
only friends are an ever-growing army of rats, was not a movie
that cried out for a remake. Given the decision to make one,
though, it’s hard to imagine a more fitting casting choice than
Crispin Glover.
Read more >
-
C+ |
*** |
+1-2|
Teens & Up
Light on plot and story logic but strong on narrative thrust and fantastic imagery, it’s the most effective of the three films… Alas, Zathura is also a family film of the contemporary family as well as for it.
Read more >
-
C+ |
**½ |
-1|
Adults
Individual set pieces are riveting, and one seldom doubts that if alien tripods were actually wreaking havoc on the Earth, this is indeed very much what it would be like. Afterwards, though, one is left with little more than ashes.
Read more >
-
C+ |
**½ |
-2|
Teens & Up
After fifteen years of trying, Jackie Chan finally broke into the U.S. market with Rumble in the Bronx and Jackie Chan’s First Strike; but it wasn’t until Rush Hour that he really connected with mainstream American audiences.
Read more >
-
C+ |
**½ |
-2|
Teens & Up*
Rush Hour 2 follows so closely in the footsteps of its hugely successful predecessor that an actual review is practically unnecessary.
Read more >
-
C+ |
**½ |
+1-2|
Teens & Up*
The best thing about Hellboy is Hellboy. And he’s a demon.
Read more >
-
C+ |
**½ |
+0|
Teens & Up
Mira Nair’s Vanity Fair is many things, but a howl to a congregation of fools isn’t one of them.
Read more >
-
C+ |
**½ |
-1|
Teens & Up
Viggo Mortensen, back in the saddle in his first post-Aragorn
role, is entertaining as the laconic, disarmingly soft-spoken
cowboy hero called "Far Rider" by the American Indians in honor
of his fleet-footed mustang Hidalgo. Remarkably, Disney doesn’t
whitewash the more politically incorrect elements of Hopkins’
tale: The Arabs Hopkins meets are sophisticated and well-bred but
also imperious, condescending to non-Muslim "infidels," slighting
to their women, callous to slave trade, and in some cases
duplicitous and murderous — though others are loyal and
honorable, and there’s also an explicitly identified "Christian"
(i.e., European) character who’s a villain.
Read more >
-
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.
Read more >
-
C+ |
**½ |
-1|
Teens & Up
The film depicts Barrie coming into the Llewelyn Davies boys’ lives like Robin Williams into the lives of his students in Dead Poets Society. This isn’t a story about magical childhood soaring where no adult can follow, but about a magical adult imparting the gift of imagination to children.
Read more >
-
C+ |
**½ |
-1|
Teens & Up
[T]he new Hitchhiker’s Guide has the whimsical look and absurdist feel of Adams’s universe, which remains best known in its novelized form but which
originated as a radio series and was later realized as a BBC television series, a set of records, a computer game, and even stage adaptations. What it’s missing is the subversive commentary, the razor-edged deconstruction of human foibles. We get Adams the absurdist, but not Adams the provocateur.
Read more >
-
C+ |
**½ |
+1|
Kids & Up
Reviewed by Sarah E. Greydanus, age 9, and Steven D. Greydanus
Read more >
-
C+ |
**½ |
+2-2|
Teens & Up*
Who is right? The issues are complex, and historians and
faithful Catholics disagree (see related article). One
Man’s Hero is sympathetic to the St. Pats and critical of
American "Manifest Destiny" expansionism and
anti-Catholicism.
Read more >
-
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.
Read more >
-
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.
Read more >
-
C+ |
**½ |
+2|
Teens & Up
Reverent, well directed, and well acted by a respectable cast including Bruce Davison, Tom Bosley and Peter Green, Confession’s weakness is also its promotional gimmick: Meyers directed the film at 24, but wrote the screenplay ten years earlier as a student in a Catholic boarding school.
Read more >
-
C+ |
**½ |
+0|
Kids & Up*
(Written by Jimmy Akin) The film is a mixed success. Fans of “The Wild Thornberrys“
will enjoy it, but it doesn’t have much ability to reach beyond
its core audience.
Read more >
-
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.
Read more >
-
C+ |
**½ |
+1-1|
Adults*
Damning with faint praise? More like praising with faint
damns. Moulin Rouge! is a failure: a towering monument of
wasted potential, of lost opportunity, of good ideas gone bad and
bad ideas gone amok. It’s got the same attention-grabbing
take-no-prisoners style (though on a far larger scale) as
Luhrmann’s first film, the sublime Strictly Ballroom; but that
film had something Moulin Rouge! can’t be bothered with:
characters who emerged from their situations as real and likeable
people. Moulin Rouge! even recycles plot elements from the
earlier film: A naive but talented young outsider falls for a
driven, unattainable professional whose Svengali-like handlers
oppose the relationship for self-interested reasons. There’s even
a climactic scene that mirrors the grand finale of
Ballroom in such specific detail that Luhrmann could sue
himself for plagiarism; but what he can’t replicate is the first
film’s heart appeal.
Read more >
-
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.)
Read more >
-
C+ |
**½ |
-1|
Kids & Up*
(Review by Jimmy Akin) Teacher’s Pet is the story of a boy and
his dog. It’s not the usual boy and his dog story, though. In
this case, the dog wants to be a boy. And in this movie,
he gets his wish.
Read more >
-
C+ |
**½ |
-2|
Teens & Up*
That includes this film’s predecessor, Shanghai Noon,
which, as its witty title suggests, was a clever
East-meets-Old-West tribute to the classic Hollywood Western.
This sequel, set in London, barely manages to be a tribute to
Shanghai Noon. Yet in his inventive, elaborate stunt
choreography Jackie pays wordlessly eloquent homage to the great
physical performers of the past: The Three Stooges, Gene Kelly,
Keystone Cops, Harold Lloyd. And two ladder-fu sequences recall
one of Jackie’s own memorable triumphs in Jackie Chan’s First
Strike.
Read more >
-
C+ |
**½ |
+1-1|
Adults
Unfortunately, these novel elements are tied to a human
conflict between two antagonistic captains (Harrison Ford and
Liam Neeson) that is not only hackneyed and uninvolving, but
morally simplistic and finally flat-out insulting. It’s hard to
be unmoved by what the men of the K-19 go through,
but it’s equally hard to overlook the glaring flaws in the human
drama — especially when the latter is directly related to the
former. As an exercise in logistics and adversity,
K-19 is compelling, but as a story about
human decisions and moral issues, it’s full of holes and
clichés.
Read more >
-
C+ |
**½ |
-2|
Adults
Wilson, a capable comic force in his own right, gets laughs
too, but for the most part he’s content to play the laid-back
straight man setting up Murphy’s punchlines. There’s an early
scene in which, discussing their working relationship, Wilson
uses a Harlem Globetrotters analogy to argue that he, the
professional spy, should be team leader Meadowlark Lemon, and
Murphy, a boxing champ, should be Fred "Curly" Neal, Meadowlark’s
sidekick. Murphy, of course, ridicules this suggestion; and,
whatever the ultimate relationship of their characters, which of
the actors is Meadowlark and which is Curly is never in
dispute.
Read more >
-
C+ |
**½ |
-2|
Teens & Up*
The suit is in fact the Tactical Uniform Experiment (TUX), a
high-tech weapons system that acts directly on the user’s nervous
system, instantly enabling Jimmy — who, unlike most of Jackie’s
characters, has no special skills of his own — to dance like Fred
Astaire, climb walls and ceilings like Spider-Man,
and, of course, fight like Jackie Chan.
Read more >
-
C+ |
**½ |
-1|
Adults
(Written by Jimmy Akin) The Hunted is the story of two
superheroes. Not the Superman / Spider-Man /
X-Men kind of superheroes, with x-ray
vision, webshooters, and the ability to control the weather. The
Batman kind. You know, no actual superhuman powers, just the
superhuman skill levels that are de rigueur for big screen
action heroes these days.
Read more >
-
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.
Read more >
-
C+ |
**½ |
+1|
Teens & Up
The most successful sports movies (recent examples include Miracle, 61*, and The Rookie (starring Caviezel’s Frequency costar Dennis Quaid), reach out across the divide separating fans from non-fans, finding ways of making the drama compelling to the uninitiated as well as aficionados. Bobby Jones, while sweetly sincere and uplifting, doesn’t fully succeed in doing this.
Read more >
-
C+ |
**½ |
+0|
Kids & Up*
If Snow Dogs is a fairly typical example of the conventional Hollywood idea of a live-action family film, Eight Below is a typical example of a new trend in family films that includes National Treasure, Hidalgo, Two Brothers, Fantastic Four and The Legend of Zorro. This is a good thing, but not yet good enough.
Read more >
-
C+ |
**½ |
+0|
Kids & Up
(Written by Jimmy Akin) Kids will definitely want to see it, as will die-hard adult fans of
the Looney Tunes characters. For their purposes, the movie is a
resounding success. It gives us a big screen adaptation of the Looney
Tunes characters which is faithful to the characters we grew up with.
Their comic sensibilities are the same, the timing is the same, even
many of the jokes are the same. And that’s part of the problem: There
is a little too much sameness about all this.
Read more >
-
C+ |
**½ |
+0|
Kids & Up
Ice Age 2 isn’t really a meltdown, but it’s no bolt from a Blue Sky.
Read more >
-
C+ |
**½ |
+1-1|
Teens & Up*
Despite its flaws, M:I‑III is competent, disposable entertainment. There’s nothing here that really grabs you like the first film’s CIA break-in, but it doesn’t leave a sour taste like Woo’s M:I‑II. Even so, in the post-007 world of Jason Bourne, that may not be enough.
Read more >
-
C+ |
**½ |
+1|
Kids & Up
Mary Poppins meets Lemony Snicket in Nanny McPhee, adapted by star Emma Thompson from Christianna Brands’s Nurse Matilda stories about a magical nanny who knows just the medicine for a family of exceedingly naughty children, and doesn’t bother about the spoonful of sugar to help it go down.
Read more >
-
C+ |
**½ |
+0|
Teens & Up
Expressions like “Good things come in threes” and “Third time’s the charm” may have their place in the world, but when it comes to comic-book movies, so far at least, anything after two is all downhill.
Read more >
-
C+ |
**½ |
+1|
Kids & Up*
With fans of its two genres, especially in the Bible Belt, Facing the Giants will doubtless be a success. To reach a broader audience, though, the filmmakers will have to scrap their playbook and learn a whole new set of rules.
Read more >
-
C+ |
**½ |
-2|
Teens & Up*
As he did with The Untouchables, in Mission: Impossible De Palma borrows the marquee value of an earlier franchise as a pretext for a series of loosely strung-together set pieces, highlighted by a single dazzling sequence that’s better than the rest of the movie put together.
Read more >
-
C+ |
**½ |
+0|
Teens & Up
If Dead Man’s Chest was inspiration gone amok, At World’s End is more — much, much, much more — of the same, only without the inspiration. In every respect it outdoes its predecessor, except in charm, entertainment and fun. Add Pirates of the Caribbean to the roster of franchises foundering on the rocks the third time out.
Read more >
-
C+ |
**½ |
-2|
Teens & Up*
Rush Hour 3 is a half-hour of brilliance, preceded by an hour of dreck. That’s a roughly comparable dreck-to-brilliance ratio to the first two Rush Hour movies, I guess, and par for the course for Jackie Chan’s Hollywood films (and a fair number of his Asian ones). It’s just that the earlier Rush Hour movies are hit-and-miss throughout, whereas Rush Hour 3 is basically non-stop missing for an hour, saving all its hits for the end.
Read more >
-
C+ |
**½ |
-2|
Adults
Burn After Reading reminds me a little of the Darwin Awards. It’s morbidly absurdist, thoroughly pointless, and can certainly be funny at times, even acutely so, with a freakish bathos that can be hard to look away from. But if you don’t feel a little queasy for laughing, and perhaps you should, you might at least feel bothered that someone wanted to put the whole thing together for your amusement.
Read more >
-
C+ |
**½ |
+1-2|
Adults
After running through some pretty contrived paces for much of its running time, The Lucky Ones has some surprises in the last act that ultimately make it more satisfying than it might have been. Honor, sacrifice, and loyalty do count for something, and tough decisions characters thought they would never make turn out to be thinkable after all.
Read more >
-
C+ |
**½ |
+0|
Teens & Up
I don’t object in principle to Keanu–Klaatu’s message. It’s just not a very interesting or enlightening thing for an ambassador from the universe to say. It’s sort of a letdown, not unlike like having the pope show up at your house only to check the batteries in your smoke detectors. There’s nothing wrong with that. You just hope he has more on his mind.
Read more >
-
C+ |
**½ |
-1|
Adults
Much like Scorsese’s Gangs of New York, it’s a film that has been long labored over, and the artist’s love of the material is clear, but the inspiration has been lost along the way and the characters reduced to cartoony types.
Read more >
-
C+ |
**½ |
+0|
Kids & Up*
Rather than a coming of age story, then, Race to Witch Mountain is a dark family action-adventure movie, with moderate doses of X-Files paranoia and Galaxy Quest sci-fi fandom satire, and a sometimes obnoxious rock soundtrack. It’s slicker, darker and funnier than the original films, though wall-to-wall action makes it a bit of a one-trick pony, and prevents the characters from catching their breath and displaying more than one side.
Read more >
-
C+ |
**½ |
+1-2|
Kids & Up*
Watching Battle for Terra, the latest computer-animated offering presented in 3D, is little like stepping into a breathtaking cathedral in a strange city and finding a church play going on in the middle of it. The drama may be competently done, but it’s the least interesting thing in the room. You keep looking past the action, stealing glances to one side or the other, absorbed in the splendor of the setting. Earnest as the players are, the moralizing story draws you in only fitfully, and most of the time you’d rather steal away and just wander aimlessly from one corner to another, taking it all in.
Read more >
-
C+ |
**½ |
+0|
Teens & Up
If you’re a fan of the material, you’ll want to see it. There are some decent action scenes, and an inevitable, tragic climax. There are also things that make no sense. It’s not bad, really. What it’s most conspicuously lacking is any sense of surprise, of revelation, of creative boldness.
Read more >
-
C+ |
** |
-1|
Kids & Up*
(Written by Suzanne E. Greydanus) Where is the real man here? Giselle’s rapport with Morgan and sweet naiveté are endearing; are we supposed to find Edward’s incompetence and arrogance equally so? Do our female hearts swoon when he checks his teeth in his sword, or boorishly flails it about at everything that moves? Why can’t the prince be an idealized example of chivalry, bravery, strength and honor, as Giselle is of sweetness and goodness?
Read more >
-
C+ |
** |
+2|
Kids & Up
Although less speculative and less freely adapted than the earlier film, The Ten Commandments shamelessly rips off interpretive conceits and even specific dramatic beats from The Prince of Egypt, from the menacing of Moses’ basket by a passing croc to the foundering of Ramses’ chariot on the shores of the Red Sea, allowing him to live to see the destruction of his army and the escape of the Israelites.
Read more >
-
C+ |
** |
+1|
Kids & Up
Harmless, diverting, very mildly uplifting, Evan Almighty offers passable family entertainment meant to appeal equally to Bible-believing conservatives and left-leaning environmentalists.
Read more >
-
C+ |
** |
+1|
Teens & Up
Like M. Night Shyamalan’s Signs, Henry Poole simply divides the world into two groups of people: those who see signs and miracles, and those who see only coincidence. How either group arrives at or explains particular conclusions, not to mention how people decide which group they belong to in the first place, isn’t explored. We just get Henry with his arms folded defiantly across he chest intoning “Coincidence,” and everyone else serenely shrugging their shoulders saying “Faith.”
Read more >
-
C+ |
** |
+2-2|
Adults*
Highlighting the powerlessness and peril of women under a system that requires them, if accused of infidelity, to prove their innocence or die, but will not punish their husbands unless their guilt is proved, the film’s spotlight exposes a barbaric injustice while for the most part leaving the surrounding social and cultural context in darkness.
Read more >
-
C+ |
** |
+2|
Kids & Up
Perhaps as much as we love underdog stories, America is just too big and powerful in too many ways to fully appreciate what a 1957 Little League championship could mean to Mexicans even in 1957, let alone 2010. The Perfect Game is a reminder of what a game can mean.
Read more >
-
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.
Read more >
-
C |
*** |
-2|
Adults
Well-crafted but improbable action set pieces cast the 56-year-old Neeson as an essentially indomitable force taking on and prevailing against almost any number of gun-toting assailants — like Jason Bourne, Bryan combines boundless resourcefulness with essentially indomitable physical prowess — but the film’s emotional force rests on the comparatively persuasive setup.
Read more >
-
C |
**½ |
+1-2|
Adults
The Island is the closest thing so far to a good Michael Bay film. Damning with faint praise, yes — but bear in mind that most of Bay’s filmography to date (Armageddon, Pearl Harbor, Bad Boys and Bad Boys II) deserves to be damned with loud damns. So let me repeat: The Island is Bay’s best film to date, and Bay’s best effort to date at a meaningful, thoughtful film.
Read more >
-
C |
**½ |
-1|
Teens & Up
Like Haley Joel Osment in Secondhand Lions wanting to
know the truth about the tales of his uncles’ alleged exploits,
Ed’s son Will (Billy Crudup) wants to know whether his dying
father really was a Big Fish in a small pond, or whether his
father’s tales were just Big Fish stories. Big Fish also
echoes Secondhand Lions by ending with a funeral scene
that provides some answers as Will finally meets certain
individuals from his father’s past.
Read more >
-
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.
Read more >
-
C |
**½ |
-2|
Adults
Beyond that, unlike Reloaded, which featured an
impressive but hardly groundbreaking freeway chase scene as its
biggest set piece, Revolutions has startling new sights to
offer, notably a spectacular siege scene that recalls the first
act of The Empire Strikes
Back with its Walker attack on the Hoth Rebel base. In
fact, The Matrix Revolutions arguably had the potential to
be the Empire Strikes Back to The Matrix’s Star
Wars, had the Wachowskis not squandered that opportunity six
months ago with Reloaded.
Read more >
-
C |
**½ |
-2|
Adults
Monte Cristo is also the only one of the three that
knows it’s essentially a comic-book movie, and has appropriately
modest aspirations. Like Road to Perdition, The Four
Feathers feels like a weighty epic, though neither movie
weighs in at more than about two hours, and neither really knows
what it’s about.
Read more >
-
C |
**½ |
-1|
Kids & Up
Van Allsburg’s simple story of a nameless, doubting boy who
rides a magical train to Santa’s home at the North Pole is
fleshed out by introducing us to a few of his young fellow
passengers, and also by making the train ride and the visit to
the North Pole far more eventful. These additions are fairly
consonant with the spirit of Van Allsburg’s work; almost any two
minutes of The Polar Express could be a scene in a Van
Allsburg story, even if they could never all be squeezed into a
single book. Fans of the writer-artist may be pleased to find
The Polar Express about as faithful an adaptation of the
author’s work as could be imagined in a feature film.
Read more >
-
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.
Read more >
-
C |
**½ |
-2|
Kids & Up*
(Co-written with Suzanne E. Greydanus) Based on a long-unfinished project dating to the New-Age /
ultra-PC heyday of Disney’s ’90s
renaissance, Brother Bear outdoes even
Pocahontas and Atlantis: The Lost Empire
with its New-Age mysticism and eco-spirituality gospel
message.
Read more >
-
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.
Read more >
-
C |
**½ |
-2+1|
Adults*
The story, in fact, could largely be described as the failure of moderate Christians to restrain fanatical Christians from oppressing innocent Muslims, thereby provoking justifiable Muslim retaliation against the Christians, both fanatics and otherwise. Yet Saladin himself is not an uncomplicated noble figure. As he prepares to lay siege to Jerusalem, he explicitly rejects the possibility of showing mercy, relenting only when Balian fights him to a standstill.
Read more >
-
C |
**½ |
+0|
Kids & Up
Take Two: The genial, blandly amusing
tale celebrates the bond between man and dog, and occasional
mildly crude humor is limited to flatulence jokes and the like.
Kids won’t notice, but attentive parents will be irked that the
filmmakers saw fit to insert fleeting depictions of an apparent
homosexual couple in the supporting cast.
Read more >
-
C |
**½ |
-2|
Adults
Dissatisfied after the screening, I went out and bought the
original 1998 graphic novel, written by novelist and "Dick Tracy"
scribe Max Allan Collins and illustrated by comic-book artist
Richard Piers Rayner ("Swamp Thing"), and read it in one sitting.
("Graphic novels" use comic-book storytelling for longer, and
hopefully more substantial, stories than traditional comic
books.)
Read more >
-
C |
**½ |
+2-1|
Adults
Other critics have already criticized the film on several
fronts: social, aesthetic, cultural. In keeping with the general
principles of this site, I’ll give priority to the spiritual and
religious implications of the story. At the heart of The Green
Mile is a powerful, compelling figure of almost preternatural
innocence and goodness whose origins are obscure — one character
describes him as having "fallen from the sky" — and who possesses
a mysterious power to take the suffering of others upon himself.
He is also able to weigh men’s hearts, and is startlingly capable
of judgment and vengeance as well as mercy and healing.
Read more >
-
C |
**½ |
+2-2|
Adults*
The answer, apparently, is that there are many film critics
who can, since Neil Jordan’s film of The End of the
Affair, which he adapted himself from Graham Greene’s novel
of the same name, has been praised not only in general terms but
specifically for its fidelity to the book. And, indeed, the film
may be said to be largely faithful to the book, in the sense that
the great majority of scenes are adapted more or less as they
were written. But this is like saying that the character of Sarah
(Julianne Moore) is largely faithful to her husband Henry
(Stephen Rea) because the great majority of her time she isn’t
sleeping with her lover Bendrix (Ralph Fiennes): the betrayal is
crucial, and gives the lie to the supposed fidelity of the rest.
If it’s not quite like making an otherwise "faithful" film about
the life of Christ that omits the Crucifixion, it’s at any rate
not entirely unlike making a film in which, some time after Good
Friday, it turns out that Jesus hasn’t been crucified after all,
but is actually living in Nazareth doing carpentry, and Pilate
has to send up centurions to apprehend him and bring him forcibly
to Jerusalem, where, after a six-month imprisonment, He is
finally crucified shortly before Christmas. (Okay, it’s not
exactly like that either, but you see what I’m getting at.)
Read more >
-
C |
**½ |
-1|
Teens & Up
(Co-written with Suzanne E. Greydanus) In the very end there’s a scene in which Anna’s grandfather (thrown into the movie as a hard-of-hearing joke) is lamenting
that “youth is wasted on the young.” Too bad the makers of this
new Freaky Friday forgot that.
Read more >
-
C |
**½ |
-2|
Teens & Up
Critics adored Batman for its eccentric, Burtonesque take on a pop-culture icon, for its moody, noirish gothic art-deco Gotham City, and of course for Jack Nicholson’s showy performance as the Joker. Comic-book fans, meanwhile, appreciated the film for rescuing the Dark Knight from the over-the-top camp comedy of the 1960s series and making him suitably dark and brooding. For all that, though, the film’s flaws are hard to overlook.
Read more >
-
C |
**½ |
-1|
Kids & Up*
Despite some imaginative visuals, such as the Escher-inspired omnidirectional castle at the finale, Labyrinth suffers from a distinct lack of charm, with poorly thought-out characters, limp plotting and a limp climax. Although positioned as a coming-of-age tale, Labyrinth indulges rather than challenges Sarah’s heroic-princess fantasies, with a made-to-order adversary whose whole world, for no very obvious reason, seems to revolve around Sarah.
Read more >
-
C |
**½ |
+2-2|
Adults*
Trade needed to be the United 93 of the human trafficking crisis. It’s closer to being the World Trade Center.
Read more >
-
C |
**½ |
-1|
Kids & Up
As a tale of female empowerment and male comeuppance, Monsters vs. Aliens might have been provocative, like, 50 years ago. Today, nothing seems more subversive — and unlikely — than a family film with a heroic leading man who’s the equal of the leading lady — one boys can look up to without having to learn a lesson about male weakness. Now that’s a movie I’d like to see.
Read more >
-
C |
**½ |
-2|
Adults
With its well-staged stickups and shootouts, its snappy fedoras and jaunty automobiles, it seems to be all surface — a glossy updating of 1930s Hollywood gangster melodrama without any substantial commentary or insight.
Read more >
-
C |
** |
+0|
Teens & Up
With The Village, Shyamalan has gone to the well once
too often. Whether or not you see the anti-climactic twists
coming is almost beside the point. For the first time, Shyamalan
has created a puzzle movie populated by characters we can’t
identify with, living in a world we can’t relate to. The viewer
has no stake in this story; he comes to the Village a stranger in
a strange land, and remains so through the course of the
film.
Read more >
-
C |
** |
+1-2|
Adults*
The comic-book Constantine is a blond Brit based in Liverpool
(think Sting by way of Christopher Lee in Terence Fisher’s The
Devil Rides Out). For the film, the casting of Keanu led to a
change of setting to California and LA. Similarly, the casting of
Shia LaBeouf (Holes) as
Constantine’s ally Chandler turned the character from a seasoned
comrade in arms into a Jimmy Olsen-like junior sidekick.
(Whatever happened to casting actors who fit the part?)
Read more >
-
C |
** |
+1|
Kids & Up
The voices are different, but the story is the same.
Read more >
-
C |
** |
+1|
Kids & Up
But Radio isn’t really interested enough in its title
character as a person to show us much in the way of his
supposedly edifying behavior. Radio is less an active character
in his own film than a passive recipient of kindness or cruelty,
a subject of debate and controversy, a political football to be
kicked around. When high-school students between classes
cheerfully greet Radio as he cautions them not to run in the
hall, the point isn’t how much he cares about them, but how much
they care about him.
Read more >
-
C |
** |
+1-2|
Adults
Neither Gipson nor Banek makes much of a poster child for the danger of civilized behavior devolving into savagery, since neither of them seems quite stable from the outset. Gipson’s a recovering alcoholic with violent tendencies who seems to cause trouble wherever he goes, while Banek’s a soulless shell of a human being too shallow to realize that he’s as unprincipled as everyone else around him, including his wife (Amanda Peet). That unstable human beings can do unpredictable and terrible things isn’t exactly a dramatic revelation; yet even so the film relies so much on contrivance and arbitrary behavior that the events and their consequences seem to have little to do with the human nature of the characters involved.
Read more >
-
C |
** |
-1|
Teens & Up
Without a doubt, the best thing about Frank Coraci’s Around the World in 80 Days is the fight scenes.
Read more >
-
C |
** |
+0|
Kids & Up*
If Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over were consistent, that
protest would become Juni’s mantra, repeated every thirty seconds
or so from that point on until the end of the film. Then again,
if Spy Kids 3-D were consistent — about anything at all — it might actually start making some kind of sense.
Read more >
-
C |
** |
+1-2|
Adults
The first hour works quite a bit better than the second hour,
in part because there is a second hour. The setup: When
CIA agent Kevin Pope (Rock) is murdered in the middle of an
important undercover operation involving the black-market sale of
a miniature thermonuclear device, Pope’s CIA mentor Gaylord Oakes
(Hopkins) must convince the sellers that Pope (or rather his
undercover persona) is still alive. To do this, Oakes must turn
to — you guessed it — Pope’s long-lost twin brother.
Read more >
-
C |
** |
+1|
Teens & Up
Fortunately, it’s mostly about Kate and Leopold.
Read more >
-
C |
** |
+0|
Kids & Up
Ella’s so blindly devoted to the Prince, and so convinced that he’s the one to save the day, that she seems just another swooning groupie rather than a worthy heroine. If she hasn’t any more sense than that, what exactly does Rick see in her? What does that say about him?
Read more >
-
C |
** |
+2|
Teens & Up
Christians lamenting the state of Hollywood sometimes flippantly comment that this or that Bible story “would make a great movie — intrigue, sex, violence, spectacle, etc.” This, though, is not a recipe for a great movie, but for a mediocre one. The story of Esther could certainly be made into a great film. One Night with the King is not that film. In some ways, it’s not even that story.
Read more >
-
C |
** |
-1|
Kids & Up*
Shrek the Third continues the deliberate bad taste that is the franchise’s hallmark, with the usual hit-and-miss results… What’s missing is the heart that leavened the first two films.
Read more >
-
C |
** |
-1|
Teens & Up
Perhaps this is what is most fundamentally wrong with the Fantastic Four franchise: None of these allegedly “fantastic” heroes has any gravitas, any actual heroic weight or depth of character. There’s nothing particularly noble, compelling or even interesting about them. Far from inspiring admiration, they don’t rise even to the level of thinking, acting and relating like grown-ups.
Read more >
-
C |
** |
+0|
Kids & Up
As bright-hued as it is dim-witted, Bee Movie is a scattered oddity of a film, combining warm, candy-colored computer-animated visuals, occasionally laugh-out-loud absurdist humor and such profound stupidity about birds and bees — and flowers and trees — that kids watching it will actually lose “facts-of-life” IQ points. Which, for the record, is not a good thing.
Read more >
-
C |
** |
+0|
Kids & Up
Over and over the movie drives home one conclusion: Larry was born to wear the uniform of a museum night guard. The inventions, the managerial decisions, the corny televised banter with cameo-role celebrities … that’s not the real Larry. The real Larry, much like an artifact in an Indiana Jones movie, belongs in a museum.
Read more >
-
C |
** |
-2|
Teens & Up
I don’t want to be too hard on 9. It’s the first film of a director who shows some promise, and a bravely idiosyncratic vision free from commercial pandering. It will probably fade quickly at the box office while soulless marketing machines like G. I. Joe and Transformers slog on and on. But Acker does himself no favors with rote anti-dogmatism and vapid characterizations.
Read more >
-
C |
** |
-1|
Teens & Up
Then there’s the scene in which President Glover, as an ecumenical prayer on behalf of the world, starts to recite Psalm 23 — but the transmission cuts out before he can even finish the first line. What, Ejiofor gets to cite Cusack’s crappy fiction again and again, but the president can’t get off one lousy Bible verse at the end of the world? Here is a melancholy thought: How many people in the audience won’t even know how “The Lord is my shep…” ends, or where it’s from?
Read more >
-
C |
** |
+1-2|
Teens & Up*
It’s tidy, comforting revisionism, like sending Rambo back into Vietnam so we can win this time. Instead of a morass in which the search for WMDs simply peters out, we get the closure of a smoking gun, a scapegoat whom Miller can buttonhole with righteous fury like Harrison Ford lacing into the president at the end of Clear and Present Danger.
Read more >
-
C- |
***½ |
-2|
Adults*
This device — unfairly dismissed by some critics as a mere
gimmick — creates an experience that in one way resembles that of
the protagonist, Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce). Leonard suffers
from a unique trauma-related condition that prevents him from
retaining new memories. It’s amnesia in reverse: The amnesiac
remembers only his life after his trauma; Leonard remembers only
his life before. He knows his name, his past history, everything — up to a point. The last thing he remembers is failing to
prevent the rape and murder of his wife.
Read more >
-
C- |
*** |
-2|
Adults*
Washington’s knockout performance is the main reason to see Training Day. It may also be the crux of the film’s moral difficulty.
Read more >
-
C- |
*** |
-2|
Adults*
There’s some freshness here amid the formula, but mainstream
audiences are liable to find The Mexican too long and
slow, too violent, and too off-putting. A few film aficianados
and critics, numbed by the present dismal spate of lousy
Hollywood efforts, may hail it as a wonderful find. But only the
absence of worthwhile competition — and a highly watchable
performance by "The Sopranos"’s James Gandolfini (who gets far
more screen time with Roberts than Pitt does) — qualifies this
middling effort as a modest success by any standard.
Read more >
-
C- |
*** |
-2|
Adults*
The good news about Best in Show, the latest film from
mockumentary veteran Christopher Guest (Spinal Tap,
Waiting for Guffman), is that it’s funny — sometimes very
funny. Guest is a sort of purist who creates the impromptu feel
and immediacy of documentary by working from a short outline
rather than a finished script; so his players really are
ad-libbing to a significant degree.
Read more >
-
C- |
*** |
-2|
Adults
It kills me to say it, but give the devil his due: James Cameron is the king of the world.
Read more >
-
C- |
*** |
-2|
Kids & Up*
No, it wouldn’t be entirely accurate to call the CGI cartoon Happy Feet an effort to claim penguins for the other side of the culture wars. But it wouldn’t be wholly wrong either.
Read more >
-
C- |
**½ |
-3|
Adults*
Morpheus’s expository speech to Neo in the first film about
the history of the power behind the Matrix — particularly the bit
about the solar issue and the moment when he holds up the battery — is both the least persuasive and the least interesting thing
about the film. It’s a perfunctory plot-level explanation that
one accepts for the sake of the action and the hero’s journey,
not something one particularly cares about for its own sake.
Read more >
-
C- |
**½ |
-2|
Adults
Women are from Venus; men are from the gutter.
Read more >
-
C- |
**½ |
-2|
Kids & Up*
No, no, not that true spirit of Christmas. This is a
Disney movie, after all. The most we can hope for is another
serving of Dickensian "Christmas Carol spirit" — brotherhood, family, generosity, that sort of thing.
Read more >
-
C- |
**½ |
-2|
Teens & Up*
Based on a computer game, Final Fantasy is always
interesting to look at, and is sometimes visually spectacular,
but it hasn’t transcended its gaming origins. The sci-fi
scavanger-hunt premise hasn’t been fleshed out into a coherent or
satisfying story. The heroes, though eye-poppingly rendered,
remain emotionally as one-dimensional as any computer-game
avatar. Even basic rules and motivations never become clear.
Read more >
-
C- |
**½ |
-2|
Teens & Up*
In the end, when the parents realize all their son went
through to win their trust, they can’t help but be proud of him.
Another touching Hallmark moment brought to you by a Hollywood
committee, none of whom has any children or parents of their own,
or knows anyone who does.
Read more >
-
C- |
**½ |
-2|
Teens & Up*
Dragonfly is a ghost story of sorts, but it isn’t a horror film (though it occasionally thinks it is). The ghost seems to be the late wife of Dr. Joe Darrow (Kevin Costner); and who would be frightened of his own best beloved, even if she happened to be a ghost?
Read more >
-
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.
Read more >
-
C- |
**½ |
-2|
Adults
Just as real tragedy requires some sort of greatness, and real blasphemy presupposes some real sense of the sacred, so the iconoclastic depends on the iconic. Hollywoodland portrays a man so thoroughly trivial, so shallow and small, that it’s hard to see why anyone would want to make a movie about him, or watch one.
Read more >
-
C- |
**½ |
-2|
Kids & Up*
As a collection of parts, almost an anthology of ideas, Dawn of the Dinosaurs is fitfully entertaining … Alas, Dawn of the Dinosaurs also marks Blue Sky Studios’ descent into the kind of crude and suggestive humor they once left to DreamWorks.
Read more >
-
C- |
**½ |
-2|
Teens & Up*
Where is the other side of the debate? Where is the Darwin who declared it “absurd to doubt that a man might be an ardent theist and an evolutionist”? Where are the likes of Charles Kingsley and Asa Gray — representatives of, respectively, religion and science, who saw no quarrel between their two worlds, and both of whom Darwin cited in this connection? Where, indeed, is the Reverend Innes who vouched that his friend Darwin “follows his own course as a Naturalist and leaves Moses to take care of himself”?
Read more >
-
C- |
**½ |
+1-2|
Teens & Up*
Once again a peasant hero reminds us that no man is a knight or peasant but thinking makes him so, and a blacksmith or a stonemason can, and in all likelihood will, shape the destiny of nations. Would you be astonished to learn that there is a proto-feminist heroine who dons armor for the climactic battle? That not only is Richard the Lionheart’s brother John a degenerate, perfidious schemer, Richard himself (briefly seen at the end of Kingdom of Heaven at the outset of his crusade) is a cruel and venal marauder, as bereft of honor as of funds?
Read more >
-
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.
Read more >
-
C- |
** |
+0|
Teens & Up*
(Written by Robert Jackson) Gods and Generals is an extremely
one-sided account of the first half of the Civil War.
Read more >
-
C- |
** |
+0|
Teens & Up
Beyond more action and bigger effects, the sequel brings
nothing new to the table. You’ll wait in vain for satirical
"revelations" about the presence of aliens among us to match the
wit of the jokes in the original about cab drivers or the World’s
Fair. Instead, we get limp gags like the one about the Post
Office being staffed by aliens. (Why? Is it a joke about postal
efficiency? The "going postal" stereotype? The fact that they
make rounds? What?)
Read more >
-
C- |
** |
+1-1|
Teens & Up
In the original Spy Kids, dashing spy parents Gregorio
and Ingrid Cortez (Antonio Banderas and Carla Guigino) exchanged
the glamorous world of espionage for the even greater adventure
of raising a family. Their children Carmen and Juni (Alexa Vega
and Daryl Sabara) weren’t actually "Spy Kids" — a term that in
the movie actually applied to a line of robotic child warriors
designed by the only somewhat sinister Fegan Floop (Alan Cumming) — but became entangled in their parents’ exotic former life when
the latter were captured by Floop’s forces.
Read more >
-
C- |
** |
+1-1|
Teens & Up*
At least there’s stuff worth looking at. First-time film
director Antony Hoffman has an eye for visuals; and the Martian
landscape, shot in an Australian quarry and a Jordanian wadi, is
stark and compelling. Then there’s the constantly swiveling,
gyrating AMEE, a preposterous plot device of a robot which, in
its (or "her") feline grace and unlimited range of free-flowing
motion, resembles a high-tech computer-generated cross between
Transformers and Battle Cats. I liked the little touches almost
as much: the crew uses nifty, collapsible hand-held computers
with a flexible, glossy display that pulls out from and rolls up
into a cylindrical CPU like a window shade, looking for all the
world like something you might actually see in a Macintosh
commercial from 2050, when the movie is set.
Read more >
-
C- |
** |
-2|
Teens & Up*
Jackie’s current string of Hollywood buddy movies (the Rush
Hour and Shanghai flicks; The Tuxedo) have
brought him success in the U.S. — but at a price. For one thing,
he’s never been allowed to do the kind of really elaborate,
extended action-comedy sequences that were the heart and soul of
solo efforts like First Strike and Rumble in the
Bronx. For another, he’s had to share the spotlight with a
string of costars ranging from alternately funny and irritating
(Owen Wilson, funny in Shanghai Noon but irritating in
Shanghai Knights, and Chris Tucker, alternatingly funny and
irritating throughout both Rush Hour movies) to just plain
irritating and not funny (Jennifer Love Hewitt in The
Tuxedo).
Read more >
-
C- |
** |
-2|
Adults
Only Jim Caviezel (The Count of Monte
Cristo; Frequency)
brings anything new to the table, displaying even more range and
subtlety than in his recent starring turn in The Count of
Monte Cristo. Other than his performance, High Crimes
holds few surprises.
Read more >
-
C- |
** |
-2|
Kids & Up*
Alas, lightning has not struck twice. The similarities between Holes and Hoot only serve to underscore how far short the latter falls from the high standard set by the former.
Read more >
-
C- |
** |
-2|
Teens & Up*
For all their evident interest and affinity for the material, though, the filmmakers haven’t made a very good movie. They’ve figured out how to get Blaze (Cage), the motorcycle-riding hellion who makes a deal with the devil, into the same picture as Carter Slade (Sam Elliott), the originally unconnected (and not even supernatural) Ghost Rider of the Old West. But they haven’t figured out either who Johnny Blaze is as a character, or what the Ghost Rider is all about.
Read more >
-
C- |
** |
-1|
Teens & Up*
What do you get if you take Robin Hardy’s cult classic The Wicker Man, and then take out religion and sex? And folk music? That’s the question writer-director Neil LaBute (Nurse Betty) sets out to answer in his 2006 remake of The Wicker Man. After watching the film, I’m still unsure of the answer.
Read more >
-
C- |
** |
+1-2|
Adults
Yet this Brideshead Revisited ultimately subverts Waugh’s subtlest and most subversive achievement: It offers all the foibles and puzzlement of the Flytes’ religious world, while all but obliterating the threads of grace running through their lives.
Read more >
-
C- |
** |
-2|
Kids & Up*
Madagascar 2 not only recalls Happy Feet’s satire of religion, it also makes the latter’s coy coming-out subtext look tame compared to its own overt running theme of sexual diversity.
Read more >
-
C- |
** |
-2|
Adults
Ironically, while paying lip service to Georgia’s high standards, My Life in Ruins really has its sights set on Nico’s lowest-common-denominator approach. Although the film shoot was granted unprecedented access to shoot in some of Greece’s most historically significant sites, including the Acropolis, there’s little effort to communicate any real sense of the history and significance of the sites.
Read more >
-
C- |
** |
+0|
Kids & Up
Parents may be interested to know that the movie tie-in toys are equipped with sound and movement as well as gear. Will the toy Blaster say things like “Pimp my ride!” and “That was off the hizook!” like he does in the movie? Will the toy Juarez riff on the Pussycat Dolls line “Don cha wish your girlfriend was hot like me”? Will the toy Darwin say “Yippie kay yay, coffee-maker!”? There’s a click moment waiting to happen in another ten or fifteen years (hopefully not before that).
Read more >
-
C- |
** |
-2|
Teens & Up*
Twilight and New Moon are essentially uncritical celebrations of that overwrought, obsessive passion that is the hallmark of immaturity — passion that wholly subordinates all sense of one’s own identity and elevates the beloved to summum bonum, or even the sole good; passion that leaps as readily to suicidal impulses and fantasies as to longing for union.
Read more >
-
C- |
** |
-2|
Adults*
The Wolfman retells the classic werewolf story, but has little to add besides volume and gore. Jump moments pile up to the point that you stop jumping and merely feel annoyed at the obvious, heavy-handed manipulation. Alone in the dark in his ancestral home, Lawrence Talbot seems to hear a creepy whisper, but it turns out he’s just remembering something from his youth. Then a minute later it happens again. Later on there’s a gotcha dream, with a menacing figure rising from the shadows and leaping at Lawrence in his bed — but then he wakes up. Or so it seems, but then it happens again — but it’s a dream again. It’s like a haunted house where they never stop jumping out and saying “Boo!”
Read more >
-
C- |
** |
-2|
Adults
The new movie, alas, is basically what you’d expect, by which I mean it’s a mess: chaotic, loud, overwrought, mindless, violent, visually incoherent — pretty much an archetypal example of everything that’s wrong with Hollywood today. Was the show this dumb? Does it matter? A movie’s job is not to live down to its source material.
Read more >
-
C- |
** |
-2|
Adults
Little things like plot holes and leaps in logic shouldn’t matter that much when a movie like this is working. Watching Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn in Charade is a lot of fun even if you’re not completely sure afterward exactly what happened. If True Lies works for you, it’s because of how Arnold and Jamie Lee Curtis sell it, not because the story makes so much sense. When you find yourself nit-picking plot points and character motivations, it’s a sign the movie isn’t working.
Read more >
-
C- |
*½ |
-1|
Kids & Up*
The last gasp of Disney Animation’s post-Walt malaise before the 1990s Disney renaissance, Oliver & Company borrows names and vague situations from Oliver Twist, but in place of Dickens’s sentiment and Victorian moralizing Oliver has only a misguided stab at “attitude.”
Read more >
-
C- |
*½ |
+0|
Kids & Up*
Are there five less inspiring words in the English language than “based on a video game”?
Read more >
-
D+ |
*** |
-2|
Teens & Up*
Directors Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise
(Beauty and the Beast) keep things moving fast enough to
keep them from getting boring, and there are a few laughs along
the way. Yet what could have made adequate summer entertainment
for older kids and parents with low expectations is ultimately
undone by pervasive echoes of New-Age pop spirituality and
neopaganism in the film’s imagery and themes.
Read more >
-
D+ |
**½ |
-2|
Adults
In the end, though, it turns out that the House of Flying
Daggers is something the film doesn’t actually care about that
much. So much is this the case, in fact, that the last time we
hear tell of them, the warriors called the Flying Daggers are
about to get into this huge climactic battle with the enemy
soldiers, whom we see advancing slowly into the bamboo forest
where the Flying Daggers are hiding… at which point the
story cuts to another plot thread, never to return.
Read more >
-
D+ |
**½ |
-2|
Adults*
This second Mission: Impossible film has almost as little to do with the 1996 blockbuster original as the latter had with the classic TV series whose name it happened to share.
Read more >
-
D+ |
**½ |
-2|
Teens & Up*
With its surreal, dreamlike ambiance, juxtaposition of
transcendent and mundane elements, lyrical imagery, and
contemplative pacing, Northfork alternately evokes
comparisons to such films as Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire,
Malick’s Days of Heaven, and certain films of Tarkovsky,
Bergman, David Lynch, and Carl Dreyer.
Read more >
-
D+ |
**½ |
-1|
Adults
(Written by Suzanne E. Greydanus) At school, Cady is befriended by two social outcasts: an artsy girl
named Janis (Lizzy Caplan) with an all-black goth look, and her
sidekick Damian (Daniel Franzese), whom Janis describes as “almost too
gay to function.” She is also befriended by the clique of popular girls
(dubbed “the Plastics” by Janis), queened by Regina (Rachel McAdams),
who think Cady pretty enough to be their friend despite her ignorance
of proper social rules for high-school “success.”
Read more >
-
D+ |
**½ |
-3|
Adults*
It’s a movie in which every slimeball Erica encounters menaces her with remorseless, repulsive sadism — there’s never anyone who just has a lewd comment, say, or even just wants to steal her purse. Everyone wants to bludgeon or shoot her, mutilate and molest her, enslave her, run her over, what have you.
Read more >
-
D+ |
** |
+1-2|
Adults
If it were only predictable, syrupy, and overlong, The Family Man might still be worth watching for the appealing performances from Leoni and Cage. Alas, its problems are more deep-rooted than that.
Read more >
-
D+ |
** |
-2|
Adults
But when the plot then descends into a Lethal Weapon-type action-chase scene, it’s clearly gone off the rails: a proper ghost story has an entirely different atmosphere from a Lethal Weapon action flick.
Read more >
-
D+ |
** |
-1|
Kids & Up
Take a politically correct morality play about Evil White Imperialists versus Noble Oppressed Minorities Living in Harmony with Nature, dress it up as entertaining family fare with cute animal sidekicks for comic relief and catchy sing-along tunes, and you’ve got one of the cartoons of the late Disney renaissance. Now take away the comic relief and cute animal sidekicks, replace the catchy sing-along tunes with whiny, forgettable Bryan Adams rock anthems, and you’ve got DreamWorks’ Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron, the story of an indomitable horse’s heroic resistance to domestication.
Read more >
-
D+ |
** |
-2|
Adults*
In place of Ford’s iconic but Indian-hating cowboy hero, Howard
gives us two white protagonists who are each, in their own ways, the
antitheses of the John Wayne character.
Read more >
-
D+ |
** |
+1-2|
Adults
See Noah (Ryan Gosling) and Allie (Rachel McAdams) lie in the middle of a darkened intersection watching the traffic light change, then scramble for safety when a car comes! See Allie enjoying post-coital oil painting in the nude, wrapped in a sheet on the porch!
Read more >
-
D+ |
*½ |
+1-1|
Adults
Yet whereas Titanic was the work of a master
manipulator, a man with a special genius for making cheesy
melodrama seem moving and gripping, Michael Bay has so far in his
career shown no competence for anything but pyrotechnics.
Cameron’s film shrewdly focused on its three leads (Leonardo
DiCaprio, Kate Winslet, and Billy Zane), all of whom are gifted
with real charisma and screen presence. Pearl Harbor,
however, is burdened by a sprawling cast of characters, led by
Ben Affleck (another Armageddon alum), who’s as blandly
generic as no-name corn flakes — and doesn’t even compensate by
taking likeable roles. Affleck’s out-acted by relative unknown
Josh Hartnett (Blow Dry), the best friend and romantic
rival (even though Hartnett’s character is equally underwritten);
he’ll be opening movies himself before long.
Read more >
-
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.
Read more >
-
D+ |
*½ |
-2|
Teens & Up
Scooby Dooby Doo
And Shaggy too
You both look and sound great.
But Daphne, you’re too Buff
Fred thinks he’s tough
And Velma — wow, you’ve lost weight!
Read more >
-
D+ |
*½ |
-2|
Adults
Take Two: The big problem: Neither set
of romantic entanglements is actually romantic, and neither set
of characters is interesting. Nonmarital affairs in both
storylines include an energetic though non-explicit bedroom scene
played for laughs.
Read more >
-
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.
Read more >
-
D+ |
*½ |
+1-1|
Teens & Up
More precisely, it’s a “funny family action film” in the Fantastic Four mold — that is, a movie whose key qualification as kid entertainment is that it isn’t good enough for grown‑ups. Too bad. Our kids deserve better. For that matter, so do we.
Read more >
-
D+ |
*½ |
-2|
Kids & Up*
Thomas Rockwell’s beloved novella How to Eat Fried Worms is a cheerfully disgusting tale of boyhood bravado and rivalry among friends that winds up going too far. The new film version, by writer-director Bob Dolman (The Banger Sisters), transmogrifies this minor classic into an unpleasant endurance test about coping with bullying by humiliating and degrading yourself before the bullies can do it for you, with a trite, tacked-on message of solidarity that’s about as realistic as a package of Gummi Worms.
Read more >
-
D+ |
*½ |
-2|
Adults
Peter Jackson’s The Lovely Bones paints an unconvincingly ham-fisted, sometimes ridiculous picture of what happens when someone dies. No, I’m not talking about the film’s attempt to portray the afterlife with kaleidoscopic montages of trippy concept art. I’m willing to give the film the benefit of the doubt, there.
Read more >
-
D |
***½ |
-3|
Adults*
This is not a thought Tom takes to heart. Nor is it one he
struggles with, or indeed ever thinks about again. The quest for
revenge is at the heart of The Salton Sea, and although in
this one scene the film fleetingly acknowledges the possibility
of an alternative to bitterness and hatred, it’s not in the
context of any larger interest in or exploration of the moral
issues.
Read more >
-
D |
*** |
-3|
Adults
This year’s Solaris from writer-director Steven
Soderbergh (Erin
Brockovich is part of an ongoing trend toward science
fiction aspiring to the tradition of 2001. Not long ago,
science fiction had become a wasteland of forgettable, mindless
action flicks. The year 2000, for example, gave us Red Planet, Battlefield Earth, The 6th Day, Hollow Man, Pitch
Black, and Supernova (as well as Mission to
Mars, which didn’t fit the mindless-action pattern but
managed to be lame anyway). Even the previous year’s The
Matrix was notable primarily for its kinetic impact and
craft; the story, though clever, was long on allusions and short
on genuine resonance.
Read more >
-
D |
*** |
-3|
Adults*
The first shot in Woody Allen’s Match Point is meant to serve as a metaphorical master-image for the film as a whole: a freeze-frame shot of a tennis ball suspended in space over the net after striking it, poised between falling on one side of the net or the other.
Read more >
-
D |
*** |
-3|
Teens & Up*
Overarching all of this is the depraved caricature that the books call “the Church” or “the Magisterium,” but is referred to in the film solely by the latter, less familiar term, which many viewers won’t recognize as a real-world reference to the teaching authority of the Catholic Church. Obsessed with preserving “centuries of teaching” from the dangers of “heresy” and “freethinkers,” by deadly means if necessary, Pullman’s Magisterium is not just oppressive but essentially equivalent to the forces of darkness, akin to Tolkien’s Mordor or the Empire in Star Wars.
Read more >
-
D |
*** |
-3|
Adults*
The movie is an impressive work of transposition, but I can’t recommend it. Excessively brutal and sexually graphic as well as nihilistic and and antiheroic, it’s a thoroughgoing deconstruction of humanity as well as heroism, one that takes its world apart without putting it back together again. There are things to admire here, but Watchmen doesn’t make me care. If you can’t care about characters facing the end of the world, perhaps it’s time to turn back the clock and move on.
Read more >
-
D |
**½ |
-3|
Adults*
Formally, Adaptation resembles the sort of essay a
clever student will sometimes pull together by taking the
assigned topic as a point of departure for a composition of his
own choosing, knowing that it will stand out for originality amid
monotonous submissions and win points for daring and wit from a
bored teacher appreciative of any show of interest.
Read more >
-
D |
**½ |
-2|
Adults*
Now, you can have a sci-fi movie in which Haley Joel Osment
plays a robot. What you can’t do is suddenly bring human-like
robots into the end of a ghost story in which the existence of
that kind of technology hasn’t been established. And you can have
Kevin Spacey claim to be from another planet, but not in the last
reel of what had until then looked like a solidly earthbound
crime thriller.
Read more >
-
D |
**½ |
-3|
Adults*
(Written by Robert Jackson) What do you get for the man who has everything?
Read more >
-
D |
**½ |
+1-3|
Adults*
It’s not hard to play connect-the-dots and pair off likable characters with one another. It’s harder to put them in a story that’s worthwhile. This is a film without conviction, about a town full of people with problems without depth, aided by a guru without soul. Mumford is a fraud. Take that in whatever sense you like.
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-
D |
**½ |
-3|
Adults*
There’s no spiritual duel, no earned respect and debt of honor. There is just a broken man and a capricious one: one harboring hopeless dreams of being a man again in the eyes of his wife and son but no hope of achieving it; the other larger than life, an implacable force of nature able to kill men and seduce women essentially at will, and who never has any reason to honor or respect the other man, but could conceivably take pity on him and go along with him, if it strikes his fancy.
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-
D |
**½ |
-2|
Teens & Up*
Once you’ve established that your story is set in a world in which Jesus Christ is explicitly not God, and the Catholic religion is a known fraud perpetuated by murder and cover-ups, it sort of sucks the wind out of whatever story it was you were going to tell us next. Langdon could be ironing his chinos and helping little old ladies across the street, and it would still be set in that world, and those of us who care about such things will find it hard to bracket that and just go along with the thrill machine.
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-
D |
** |
-3|
Adults
"Everything he ever needed to know," blurbs the tagline, "she
learned in prison." More accurately, everything he ever needed to
know, she learned in the ghetto; the larger point is that she has
everything to teach and nothing to learn, and he has everything
to learn and nothing to teach.
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-
D |
** |
-2|
Teens & Up
Yes, the Cat now has mojo — yeah, baby, groovy!
Except he goes “OH yeah!” instead in this movie.
What’s next? Will the Sneetches get wild and crazy?
Will the Lorax get jiggy with Daisy-Head Mayzie?
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-
D |
** |
-2|
Adults
Meet Pete (Ed Burns). He’s a cameraman who dresses and
behaves in slacker fashion, drinks beer on the job, sleeps around, and
says rude things to Lanie. This means he’s an alright guy who Does Know
How to Have Fun.
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-
D |
** |
-3|
Teens & Up*
Prot pulls off these party tricks quite convincingly. Yet get
him started on his theories about mankind, family, society, and
the like, and the spell is broken: He’s clearly delusional. Not
that I’m saying anything about the truth or falsehood of his
claims. Prot may very well be an alien. That doesn’t mean he
isn’t delusional.
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-
D |
*½ |
-1|
Teens & Up
This provocative comeuppance for can-do American spirit is
thrown to the winds in the remake, which from the outset
establishes pilot Frank Towns (Dennis Quaid) and his co-pilot
A.J. (Tyrese Gibson in the Attenborough role) as bullying,
swaggering creeps with no redeeming traits who exist in order to
be taught a lesson. They’re gratuitously abusive to the ragtag
team of abruptly unemployed oil-riggers they’ve come to evacuate.
Their arrogant repartee in the opening minutes is so full of
leering sexist humor (Frank’s the sort of guy who can’t even
buckle his seat belt without making a lewd remark about it) that
by the time A.J. observes of the massive sandstorm into which
they’re flying, "That’s a big one, Frank," we can tell it must be
serious, since Frank makes no crass response.
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-
D |
*½ |
-3|
Adults
Here is a film so woefully misconceived, so completely devoid of even generic, safely banal Hollywood spiritual uplift, that it made me long for the spiritual depth and religious meaning of Sister Act and Bruce Almighty.
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-
D |
*½ |
+0|
Kids & Up*
(Written by Jimmy Akin) Nickelodeon’s animated "Hey Arnold!" TV
series, created by the Snee-Oosh animation house, is one of the
better cartoon shows around.
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-
D |
*½ |
-2|
Teens & Up
By the time that you read this short essay of ours
The Grinch will have made ten squintillion more dollars!
The people have spoken! The Grinch is a hit!
So who cares if some critic writes critical crit?
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-
D |
*½ |
+0|
Kids & Up*
Unfortunately, while this sequel is the least morally problematic of Muniz’s three big-screen outings, it’s also far and away the lamest, lacking utterly its predecessors’ fitful humor and excitement. When the high point of your movie involves a Queen Elizabeth lookalike getting down to a youth-orchestra Euro-pop version of Edwin Starr’s "War," something has gone disastrously wrong.
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-
D |
*½ |
-1|
Teens & Up
The film is actually a joint evisceration not only of Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, but also of “Jabberwocky,” with Alice recast as (so help me) a messianic warrior-hero destined to claim the fabled “Vorpal Sword,” don shining armor, and wage an epic battle on the fated “Frabjous Day” against the forces of the Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter) and the dragon-like Jabberwocky.
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D |
*½ |
-2|
Adults
The gods of classical mythology have always been selfish and capricious, but in a tempestuous, grand, passionate style, sort of like “Dallas” in heaven. In the new Clash of the Titans, the gods are about as grand and passionate as “The Simpsons,” and not a tenth as interesting. The original 1981 Clash of the Titans gave us Zeus portrayed by Laurence Olivier with a sort of dissolute patrician dignity. As played by Liam Neeson in the remake, he’s merely grumpy and vacillating. No wonder his half-human son Perseus (Sam Worthington) keeps telling anyone who will listen that he’s a man, not a god.
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-
D |
* |
+1-1|
Teens & Up*
“Talk about the wrong stuff” is one officer’s disparaging comment as Willis’ team struts about NASA ostensibly preparing for their mission, hamming it up like class clowns in high school, ridiculing the process, flaunting their lack of couth like a badge of honor — all but letting their butt cracks stick out. Yes, in this film the honors science students are obliged to sit back and watch as the shop class saves the world.
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-
D |
* |
-2|
Kids & Up*
Benji Off the Leash is undoubtedly the first dog movie ever made that thinks that a happy ending for a boy and his dog is not for the boy to get to keep the dog, but for the dog to go off to Hollywood to make a motion picture.
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-
D |
* |
-2|
Teens & Up
What on earth was anyone thinking? Luther’s so Kranky
he can’t just skip the Christmas-Eve shindig… he wants a
"total boycott," even of charitable donations — despite the fact
that they’re saving money on the cruise over against their usual
seasonal expenditures. (That his wife Nora, played by Jamie Lee
Curtis, absolutely refuses to go along with his plans until
Luther caves on the charitable donations is some consolation, but
not nearly enough.)
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-
D |
* |
+0|
Teens & Up
The Time Machine is so sloppy that it makes Kate and Leopold look like Back to the Future. It’s also pitiful entertainment, succeeding neither as spectacle, as action-adventure, or as love story.
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-
D |
* |
+0|
Teens & Up
Why, I haven’t come across a fairy-tale premise calling for such childlike wonder and acceptance since the taxation of trade routes was in dispute and the greedy Trade Federation set up a blockade around the planet Naboo.
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D- |
*** |
-3|
Adults*
In the end, how you feel about Nurse Betty will in good
part depend, I suppose, upon whom you agree with, Charlie or
Wesley. If you find Betty as enchanting and remarkable as Charlie
does, then you may be relieved and happy when her troubles are
over and she is at last able to realize her dreams. On the other
hand, if like Wesley you regard her as ridiculous and pathetic,
then you will find this movie a contemptuously hateful tale of
cruelty and delusion, devoid of any spark of sympathy or
compassion.
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-
D- |
*** |
+2-3|
Adults*
(Written by Robert Jackson) 8 Mile is the story of a cast of characters who were
dealt a lousy set of cards by life and who then proceed to tear
most of their cards in half.
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-
D- |
**½ |
-3|
Adults*
That book, with its breathless vignettes of the 19th-century
lower Manhattan underworld, has no central plot or unifying
storyline. Similarly, the most striking moments in Scorsese’s
film come as glimpses into that time and place. When we see
hordes of immigrants milling about in the unguessed catacombs
beneath the Old Brewery of the Five Points neighborhood, or rival
fire brigades brawling in the streets rather than fighting the
fire, it’s easy to feel that here, surely, is a dark and strange
world that would be interesting to explore, a world in which
memorable stories must have taken place.
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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- |
** |
-3|
Adults*
As directed by Ridley Scott (Gladiator), Hannibal is
stylishly mounted and has its entertaining moments. Ultimately,
though, it’s like most horror movies: repellent where it should
have been frightening, and, in the end, uninvolving and hollow.
So many characters suffer such ghastly things, yet none of it
seems to matter much.
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-
D- |
*½ |
-3|
Adults*
Even in the silent era, with Douglas Fairbanks playing every
legendary hero from Zorro to
Robin Hood to D’Artagnan,
seeking adventure everywhere from the Spanish Main (The Black Pirate) to Arabian
Nights territory (The Thief of Bagdad) to South
America (The Gaucho), King Arthur was overlooked.
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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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-
D- |
* |
-2|
Adults
Extreme Ops (Paramount) looks an awful lot like one of those supercharged sports-themed TV commercials, with its glossy footage of daredevil athletes snowboarding down sheer ice walls, skateboarding atop trains, and throwing themselves off precipices. In fact, given that few other situations call for such extreme antics, the movie is actually about the making of a sports-themed TV commercial.
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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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D- |
* |
-2|
Adults*
Funnier, perhaps, than anything in The
Animal - which isn’t saying much - are the opportunities for
critics to make "Survivor" jokes inspired by the presence of
costar Colleen Haskell, the elfin-faced young thing who became a
celebrity during the course of the CBS monster hit.
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-
D- |
½ |
-2|
Teens & Up
How bad is Fantastic Four? So bad that in desperation execs have resorted to trying to spin it as a "funny family action film," as one studio rep put it. It’s the Kangaroo Jack strategy: When your dumb, trashy film clearly isn’t good enough for adolescents, let alone adults, reposition it as a kiddie flick. It’s an insult to family audiences. Our kids deserve better than Hollywood’s garbage.
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-
F |
***½ |
-4|
The Cell gives imaginative and
visual shape to as it were the very soul of misogynism,
perversion, depravity, sadism, and the supreme nihilism and
egotism of the damned. The film also has some images of beauty,
peace, and serenity; even some Christian symbolism — but all this
is quickly overwhelmed, even betrayed and subverted, so that the
dark themes dominate the film.
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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 |
***½ |
-3|
Some movies have a moral. I say that as a mere
statement of fact, with no implication that either having or not
having a moral necessarily makes a movie better or worse. Some
movies have a moral; American Beauty - and this is also a
mere observation, not a value judgment - has an aesthetic.
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F |
***½ |
-4|
The malleable,
plastic vision of human nature in general and of sexuality in
particular, in which gender and relationships shift and merge and
re-form like blobs of goo in a lava lamp, represents a profoundly
anti-human fantasy and an affront to personal dignity.
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-
F |
***½ |
-4|
In the end, in its easygoing, nonpolemical way, Brokeback Mountain is nothing less than an indictment not just of heterosexism but of masculinity itself.
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-
F |
***½ |
-4|
Fans and philosophy students endlessly debate whether the world of The Matrix is most influenced by Eastern mysticism or Cartesian philosophy, Christianity or gnosticism, humanism or post-humanism. No such debates will be occurring over V for Vendetta, which weighs down what could have been a thought-provoking dystopian scenario with leaden specificity and sanctimonious ideo-political commentary.
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-
F |
*** |
-4|
No One
By the film’s end, Frankie is faced with a choice that the
priest says could lead to his damnation. The film makes the wrong
choice seem right. But it leaves it an open question, I think,
whether making that choice leads to redemption or damnation.
Million Dollar Baby suggests, perhaps, that the right and
most loving thing to do for someone else may entail one’s own
damnation. This is very far from good way of looking at things.
But it suggests a film that is less complacent, more thoughtful,
less like smug propaganda than some of its detractors allege.
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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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F |
**½ |
-3|
The film’s central conceit is that the process of colorization
is spread through acts of exploration or self-discovery by which
people step outside their customary ways into a new world. In the
black-and-white world of the 1950s TV sitcom, one common means of
transformation is sexual activity, which didn’t exist in
"Pleasantville" until the teenagers (Jennifer in particular)
introduced it. When Jennifer gently explains the facts of life to
her sitcom mother (Joan Allen), the latter is certain that her
prosaic husband (William H. Macy) could never be induced to
engage in such activity; so Jennifer proceeds to coach her mother
(offscreen) on how to commit self-abuse. The mother then proceeds
to do so, with such explosive results that by a kind of
sympathetic magic the tree in the front yard bursts into
flame.
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F |
** |
-3|
"In the Church they say to forgive," one character observes
dubiously. But in Creasy’s book, to forgive is divine, to
mutilate and butcher human. "Forgiveness is between them and
God," he says, conveniently overlooking the relevant biblical
injunctions even though we know he can quote chapter and verse
when he wants to. "My job is to arrange the meeting." We know we
should agree with Creasy, because his murderous rampage is scored
by a cool rock soundtrack and sanctified by a mother’s kiss.
That’s got to be righteous.
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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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-
F |
*½ |
-4|
Is The Da Vinci Code anti-Catholic? Well, if it isn’t, then we must simply conclude that no such thing as anti-Catholicism exists, or at least that no anti-Catholic movie has ever been made.
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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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F |
* |
-4|
Adults
A lurid sort of Christopher Hitchens vision of history pervades Elizabeth: The Golden Age, Shekhar Kapur’s sequel to his 1998 art-house hit Elizabeth.
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-
F |
½ |
-2|
Kids & Up*
As an enthusiastic fan of the first Babe, I wanted to
believe in the sequel, even if it did turn out to be too dark for
young kids. After all, Miller was also the screenwriter and
producer for the original film, directed by Chris Noonan. So I
came to Babe: Pig in the City with high hopes.
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-
F |
0 |
+0|
Teens & Up*
Here is the closest thing to a positive statement I can make about Battlefield Earth: Although it is an adaptation of a novel by L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of the sect of Scientology - and although it stars John Travolta, one of Hollywood’s most high-profile Scientologists and a long-time champion of this project - Battlefield Earth is not a cryptic tract or allegory of Scientology.
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-
F |
0 |
-3|
Adults
Chesterton’s second way is to go to the "opposite extreme" of
focusing on Francis’s religion in a "defiantly devotional" way,
with all the "theological enthusiasm" of the first Franciscans.
The trouble here, of course, is that such an approach would be
impenetrable and unmoving to most audiences today. (Chesterton
gives no example of this extreme, but one may see something like
it in Leonardo Difilippis’s recent Thérèse.)
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-
F |
0 |
-1|
Teens & Up
The movie version of The Spirit is a straightforward excursion into the Frank Miller Universe at its most reductionist, self-parodying and content-free. There are no characters or relationships, only placeholders where characters ought to be. There is no drama or conflict, only dueling line readings and cartoony brutality. There is nothing at stake and nothing and no one to care about, only a pointless, shapeless exercise in wildly veering moods and styles.
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-
F |
-4|
No One
A Jesus who commits sins — who even thinks he commits
sins, who talks a great deal about needing "forgiveness" and
paying with his life for his own sins; a Jesus who himself speaks
blasphemy and idolatry, calling fear his "god" and talking about
being motivated more by fear than by love; who has an ambivalent
at best relationship with the Father, even trying to merit divine
hatred so that God will leave him alone — all of this is utterly
antithetical to Christian belief and sentiment. This is not
merely focusing on Jesus’ humanity, this is effectively
contradicting his divinity.
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-
Not long ago the Washington Post printed a scathing op-ed by the Irish singer-songwriter Sinéad O’Connor responding to Pope Benedict XVI’s March 2010 pastoral letter of sorrow and remorse over abuse of minors in Church-run Irish institutions such as the Magdalene asylums for girls and similar institutions for boys.
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-
The first line of the film’s closing credits read,
"Introducing S1m0ne as Herself." At the time of the early-look
screening I attended, no further information about "Simone" was
readily available. The movie’s production notes, website, and
Internet Movie Database entry were
all silent about who, or what, Simone might be.
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-
Karol: A Man Who Became Pope isn’t the first TV movie on the life of Karol Wojtyla, the future Pope John Paul II — but among the new crop of Pope movies coming in the wake of the Holy Father’s death, it’s not only the first, but also the only one seen and praised both by Benedict XVI and John Paul II himself.
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-
Jeffrey Overstreet called the movie year 2006 “the year of the nightmare.” I’m starting to think we haven’t woken up yet.
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-
The most serious problem with Constantine’s Sword, though, is not its historical distortions. The most serious problem is its out-and-out attack on Christianity as such. It is not merely antisemitism that troubles Carroll. It is not even only Jesus’ death and resurrection. Ultimately, it is the very belief that in Jesus God did something both unique and definitive, something with universal applicability for all mankind.
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Chastity is a precious thing, and the struggle to be chaste is both an inevitable part of a moral life and a legitimate subject for narrative art. In part, this quest for chastity may legitimately form some part of Twilight’s appeal. At the same time, a narrative that wallows in the intoxicating power of temptation and desire, that returns again and again to rhapsodizing about the beauty of forbidden fruit, may reasonably be felt to be a hindrance rather than an affirmation of self-mastery.
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