Movie Mom
All reviews by Title
I love it when a plan comes together.
And I love it when a summer movie delivers all of the chases, crashes, explosions, wisecracks, and sheer exuberant fun that we have a right to expect when the...
Cross "2001" with "ET" and "Blade Runner" and throw in some "Pinocchio," some "Wizard of Oz," some "Velveteen Rabbit" and a touch of "Our Town," and you might have some sense of what to expect from...
Given the talent involved, it really is almost impressive how bad "Abandon" is.
The movie is written by Stephen Gaghan, who last won an Oscar for "Traffic" and here makes his directing debut...
"About a Boy" is the story of a shallow man appropriately named Will Freeman (Hugh Grant) who believes, contrary to John Donne, that every man is an island.
Or at least he believes that that...
It begins as a sweet, simple love story. A flirtatious waitress named Lucy (Kate Hudson) falls for a man named Adam (Stuart Townsend). All the other men in Lucy's life pursued her, but Adam lets ...
Warren Schmidt (Jack Nicholson) sits at his desk as though he was standing at attention during a full-dress inspection. As he watches the clock move from 4:58 to 5:00, he is as clenched as a fist....
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Posted on Thursday June 21, 2012
Bartleby (Justin Long) has been turned down at every single college he applied to. His friends' college plans have also turned out badly.
No problem. Bartleby is a can-do Ferris Bueller ty...
On the list of movies featuring Beatles songs, this one comes far below
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Posted on Tuesday February 5, 2008
The
Navy SEALS approached
the Bandito Brothers film-makers ab...
Adam (Hugh Dancy), appropriately shares his name with the first man because even though he lives in contemporary Manhattan, he is in a very real way new to the world. He seems at once tightly woun...
"8 Crazy Nights" is a bit of an enigma. In the Venn diagram of movie goers, Adam Sandler fans are not an easy overlap with those who cherish holiday musicals. This lame attempt at comedy is more li...
There are people who care so passionately about something that it fills them up completely. And then there are the rest of us, who can never lose themselves that way, people who divide their inter...
The first great movie of 2011 is thought-provoking, exciting, and swooningly romantic. Writer/director
George Nolfi takes on the biggest questions of all -- faith...
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Posted on Thursday March 21, 2013
We all have at least one, a summer when everything changes, when we first start to become the person we truly are. Every writer tries at least once to tell the story of one of these summers and th...
When Elmo's favorite friend, his beloved blanket, is tossed into Oscar's trash can, Elmo goes in after it, only to find himself transported to Grouchland, where grouches cut off the flowers and kee...
Fans of the old "Rocky and Bullwinkle" cartoon show fondly remember its wisecracking sensibility and its refusal to take anything seriously, especially itself. And they remember its terrible puns,...
This movie spends a lot of time and energy on the importance of dreams and imagination, delivering its message in both form and content. I wish it had spent a little more time and energy on the im...
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Posted on Wednesday December 21, 2011
Maybe it's just that my expectations were so low because it was not screened for critics (meaning the studios did not think they would get even one good review), but "Aeon Flux" was not so bad. A ...
Rose Sayer and her brother Samuel are English missionaries in 1914 German East Africa. Their rare contact with the outside world is through Charlie Allnut, who delivers their occasional ma...
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Posted on Thursday May 30, 2013
This movie features two of the most glorious sights on earth -- Paradise Island and Salma Hayak in a bikini. Unfortunately, it keeps putting unappealing characters and a dumb story in front of the...
I took four young teenagers to this movie and they loved it. But I was not as impressed.
The idea is a cute one -- but it was cuter when they did the same thing in two editions of "Spy Kid...
Frankie Muniz returns as junior secret agent Cody Banks in a moderately cute action comedy that will satisfy its target audience of 8-14-year-olds.
Cody is the superstar of the secret CIA t...
"Prestidigitation."
Akeelah (Keke Palmer) has just won her school's spelling bee and everyone is impressed and proud. But Dr. Larrabee (Laurence Fishburne), who, like Keke, grew up in Comp...
One of the best of the contemporary Disney releases, this classic tale of the magic lamp benefits tremendously from the energy and humor of Robin Williams as the genie. Only the Disney animators c...
There is only one reason to see "The Alamo," and it is Billy Bob Thornton. His portrayal of Davy Crockett is magnificently vibrant, fully imagined, and so breathtakingly evocative of the essence o...
Kate Hudson is so irresistibly charming that it is easy to forget how tepid and uninspired this movie is. It is always a delight to see Hudson's saucer-eyed smile and impeccable timing, but it wou...
In "Alex Cross," Tyler Perry is called upon to: show devastating grief, show incendiary fury, make threats, throw punches, and take over a part played twice on screen by Morgan Freeman. He is not...
Alexander the person was great. "Alexander" the movie is not.
It is a horrendously bad movie, a genuine 40-car pile-up of literally epic proportions, a three-way head-on collision of bad wr...
What's it all about, Charlie?
Charles Shyer and Nancy Meyers used to be married and they used to make movies together (Baby Boom, the remakes of Father of th...
Will Smith delivers a knock-out punch as Muhammed Ali in this outstanding film that follows the champ from his first heavyweight title to the "Rumble in the Jungle" when he won the title again by d...
Almost 150 years ago Oxford mathematician Charles Dodgson published his wildly imaginative story about Alice's adventures down a rabbit hole. And now the wildly imaginative director Tim Burton has...
Back in the era of Saturday matinées, "Aliens in the Attic" would have been just fine sandwiched between a couple of cartoons and a newsreel, especially if about half an hour was lopped off and ...
Margo Channing (Bette Davis), a Broadway diva beginning to show her age, meets the young fan who stands outside the theater after every performance (Anne Baxter as Eve Harrington). Taken by...
Somewhere deep inside this movie, like the little tiny pea in the bed of the princess, is an idea that could have been an interesting movie. Unfortunately, as with that bed of the princess, it is ...
"All About the Benjamins" is to Ice Cube what "Crossroads" is to Britney Spears, a vanity vehicle designed by a star who has very little sense of how people like the characters in the movie (or the...
An appealing cast of talented performers and some mild good intentions cannot save this uneven and sour comedy (originally released with the title "Strike!") about a girls' boarding school that is ...
Huey Long was man of gigantic proportions, an epic, almost operatic figure who rose to power as the greatest of populists, succumbed to corruption, and was murdered at age 42. His story inspired a ...
Huey Long was man of gigantic proportions, an epic, almost operatic figure who rose to power as the greatest of populists, succumbed to corruption, and was murdered at age 42. His story inspired a ...
There's something far scarier about this movie than its CGI monsters, whose lack of any apparent weight makes them seem as threatening as the floating Clifford balloon in the Macy's parade. What's...
Morgan Freeman returns as Dr. Alex Cross in this prequel to "Kiss the Girls." Like the original, this movie has a nursery rhyme title and centers on a kidnapped girl. This time it is not a serial k...
The writer and star of
Meet the Parents reunite in this much tamer comedy about a risk-averse guy who meets a free spirit.
Reuben (Ben Stiller) evaluates risk for a living. ...
Two young Canadian wolves representing the extremes of the social scale join forces in the animated "Alpha and Omega," which keeps them stuck in the bland middle. Though the visuals are in 3D, t...
"This whole thing is about parenting," explains the ironically named Sonny Truelove (Bruce Willis). He is telling an off-screen questioner about his son Johnny (Emile Hirsch). Or, the questioner ...
Novelty songwriter Ross Bagdasarian noticed that spee...
The third in the series about the singing chipmunks and their exasperated but perpetually forgiving human father is a little brighter and sweeter than its predecessors. It tones down the slapstick ...
Antionio Salieri (F. Murray Abraham in an Oscar-winning performance), the court composer, should have been Mozart. He followed all the rules, worked hard, and cared deeply. Music was his life. M...
Parents should know that this film includes frank descriptions of some of the most profound atrocities of the slave trade, including torture and rape. The painful symptoms of Wilberforce's l...
Amelia Earhart, the pioneering aviator who was lost over the Pacific, is given the big Hollywood biopic treatment in a curiously retro film that feels like it was intended for Katherine Hepburn or ...
"Amélie" is filled with whimsical charm the way that a chocolate soufflé is filled with air.
Amélie (Audrey Tatou) grows up the lonely child of parents who do not know how to show t...
Celebrate America with this glorious love letter to our wonderful country. If Norman Rockwell made a movie, this would be it. If "America the Beautiful" was a movie, this would be it. If America...
It sounds like it can't miss -- a delicious situation created by a guy who knows how to write jokes, with an all-star cast. But it does miss. Billy Crystal, who wrote the script with Peter Tolan,...
There's a reason so many movies give us a character who has just one last job to do before he (it's almost always a he) can get free. It is because we can sympathize with someone despite even the ...
Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey) is a 42-year-old man who has lost touch with anything that made him feel alive. His wife Carolyn (Annette Benning) is a realtor, so highly focused that she is clenched...
The Roman rulers used to distract the populace from the problems of corruption and decadence with "bread and circuses." Today's equivalent might be junk food and television, especially "reality" t...
The movie takes place on a single night in 1962, immediately before two good friends, Curt (Richard Dreyfus) and Steve (Ron Howard), are about to leave for college. Curt and Steve are facing enormo...
American Outlaws" is a rock and roll western for the MTV era. It may be a little on the dumb and cheesy side, but it does not take itself or its characters too seriously and it has enough cute cow...
This is a movie about teenagers who promise each other that they will have sex before the night of the prom, and then do whatever they can to make it happen. It is one of the raunchiest and most ex...
Teenagers will want to see this movie because it is raunchy and gross. But like the original, the gross and raunchy moments, though frequent, are less important than the movie's core sensibility, ...
The first indication of a problem with this fourth in the series that began with the ground-breaking (and pastry-breaking) "American Pie" is that stars Jason Biggs and Seann William Scott are liste...
Harvey Pekar says, "Ordinary life is pretty complex stuff." His own life is a good example. He has the most ordinary of professions - he is a file clerk in a veteran's hospital. He lives in the m...
Meet two extraordinary women -- Dee Roberts, based on a real-life single mother who took on corrupt and racist law enforcement officials in Texas and Nicole Beharie, the woman who plays her, who ma...
Okay, I admit it -- I laughed. A lot. Even more surprising, I smiled.
I was even a little sorry that this is the last of the American Pie trilogy.
For any...
Plot: In 1839, a group of Africans sold into slavery were being transported to the United States on a Spanish ship. Off the coast of Cuba, they escaped from their shackles and attacked the crew, le...
Going over the same ground as the original 1975 cult classic and its many derivative offspring, this "Amityville Horror" provides enough of a shiver for novice horror fans to guarantee an opening-w...
Feivel Mousekewitz is a little Russian mouse who emigrates to the United States with his family, after they are told that "there are no cats in America and the streets are paved with cheese." He b...
Part of the charm of "An Education," a bittersweet coming of age story based on a brief memoir by Lynn Barber, is how much we know what its main character does not. Jenny (an incandescent Carey Mu...
No zombies. No chain saws. No mutants. No aliens. No meteors hurtling toward Earth. And yet, this is the scariest movie of the year, not, as some jokes suggest, because it is a two-hour Power ...
A bear is wandering through farms looking for something to eat. An angry and abusive man is following the woman who left him because he wants her to come back, or because he wants to hit her again,...
Robert DeNiro loves comedy. Who knew?
After decades as America's most respected dramatic actor, DeNiro discovered that he enjoyed making people laugh in "Analyze This," where he tweaked his mo...
A sumptuous (if completely inaccurate) animated retelling of the mystery of the Tsar's lost daughter, this movie will captivate kids and their families.
In this version, the little Anastasia...
Remember the old "Spanky and Our Gang" episodes where the boys wouldn't let Darla into the treehouse? Imagine that plot set in the all-white-guys world of 1970's television news, when there were o...
"Plot: A shy little girl from Maine makes friends with a seal in this fact-based story about a seal that swam from Boston to Maine every summer for 24 years. Toni (Tina Majorino) is more comforta...
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[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THg8Yes6zec[/youtube]
Merry Christmas!...
Despite lavish settings and sweeping camera movement, this sumptuously produced Andrew Lloyd Weber musical feels static, stuffy, and stagey. This is in part because so much of it takes place on a...
Watch out -- they're trying to sell this movie as a thriller with supernatural overtones, but it turns out that it is a very traditional love story, and a surprisingly touching one, too.
Jenni...
Harvard professor of Symbology Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks) returns for another round of save the world heroics peppered with chases, kidnapping, murders, clues, codes, and ancient manuscripts, a bea...
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[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXLBEByDsdg&feature=related[/youtube]...
There are two odd couples in this movie. One is the traditional pairing of two opposite characters just for the fun of seeing the sparks (and the inevitable "I learned so much from you!" conclusio...
This is the fourth movie version -- and the second this year -- of the story of Anna Leonowens, brought to Siam in 1864 by King Monghut to teach his children. Anna and the King end up teaching each...
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Posted on Thursday November 15, 2012
Sincere performances and some star charisma can't save this movie from its derivative screenplay, a retread of every "callow youth learns what it means to be a man" service drama. This movie sampl...
A boy beset by bullies turns bully himself, going after the ants in his family's back yard. But the ants shrink him down to their size and he learns something about ants, about empathy, about hims...
Therapy films usually follow the same pattern as romance films, a sort of one-sided romance of the subjects with themselves. In other words, it’s therapist meets patient, therapist loses patient...
The technological mastery and all-star cast all but obscure the one real problem of this movie -- it does not know who its audience is. The computer animation -- and the ad campaign -- suggest that...
If this story wasn't true, they'd have to invent it. Indeed, they already did. "This is Spinal Tap," one of the most outrageous, influential, and utterly hilarious movies ever made, is a "mockume...
Woody Allen has repackaged characters, themes, and even jokes from his best movies in this soggy and lackluster trifle about a young comedy writer stuck in various relationships.
This time,...
Adele (Susan Sarandon), a free-spirited teacher, takes her 14 year old daughter Ann (Natalie Portman) to Los Angeles in a gold-colored Mercedes. Ann resents her mother for taking her away from ever...
There are at least three movies here and two of them are great. There is the classic adventure saga of the hero who is trying to get home and save his family. Mel Gibson, as director, has created...
This movie should be called "Smart and Smarter." In addition to the thrilling story, masterful performances, and impeccable technical authenticity, it is a heartening story of the triumph of smart ...
The best thing about this fairy tale is that its happily-ever-after ending is satisfyingly real world. It's the most enchanting treat for girls since The Princess Diaries.
It's less of a fai...
The people behind "March of the Penguins" have put together another endearing story of life in the coldest place on earth. This time, it is the story of two newborns, a polar bear called Nanu and a...
Is it over yet? Please?
Ice Cube's Are We There Yet? was tough enough to sit through, though unaccountably successful. Thus, we have this doubly unnecessary sequel. It is so creatively ban...
Robert Benchley once wrote, "There are two kinds of travel, first class and with children." But the longest, naggiest, car-sickiest travel with children cannot be any more tedious than this weak a...
Not one of Disney's best, but this is a nice animated story of an elegant cat (voice of Eva Gabor) who must find her way back home with her kittens to protect their inheritance from an evil butler....
This is a very scary movie about a very scary subject -- terrorism. Indeed, its release was delayed due to concerns about the sensitivity of the material. Jeff Bridges plays Michael Faraday, a prof...
The summer thrill ride movie is becoming as much of a 4th of July tradition as the picnic and the fireworks, and the 1998 version is "Armageddon," the second movie of the year about a meteor headed...
This movie may take its title from the Jules Verne classic adventure about the man who circled the globe in 80 days to win a bet, but it is really just a Jackie Chan movie, and a below-average one ...
Russell Brand takes over the title role in this unnecessary remake of the better-remembered-than-re-watched 1981 film starring Dudley Moore and the Oscar-winning Sir John Gielgud. It's harder to fi...
Director Luc Besson is known for his striking visuals and his mash-ups of sentimental, even corny moments with intense, graphic violence. At his best, in films like The Professional and The Fifth ...
A sleigh pulled by reindeer? That's so five decades ago. With the population topping seven billion and the Duggars getting ready to welcome baby number 20, Santa (Jim Broadbent) needs all the s...
This movie may be about one of the most famous outlaws in the days of the Wild West, but it is not a bang-bang shoot-em-up Western. It is a broody psychological Western, a lot of peering out into ...
A juicy premise, a powerhouse cast, and energetic direction combine for a satisfying thriller about a police station under seige. It's a big-budget remake of John Carpenter's 1976 film of the same...
A show of hands, everyone. If you think it's a good idea to begin a movie for children by killing off a young boy in an industrial accident as his father looks on, raise your hand. Anyone?
I didn...
Once upon a time there was a farmer who wanted to build a rocket ship and orbit the earth. And there were some evil ogres who wanted to stop him.
That's the best way to describe this sligh...
The star of this movie is first-time director Chris Robinson, who took an appealing but conventional story of five friends on the brink of adulthood and made it come alive with a vibrant, pulsing, ...
For the third time in a row, Disney departs from its traditional animation release formula with this non-musical, intense-action adventure (rated PG for violence) about the search for the legendary...
Little toy jungle animals are lined up on the rug. Typewriter keys bang lik...
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Faith Street Film Partners, a Rochester, NY-based collective of filmmakers, churches, investors, and supporters – totaling more than 1,000 people – decided to fund, film, and release their new ...
Those who are willing to open their hearts to this urban fairy tale will find its pleasures, as long as they they don't think about it too hard.
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Posted on Tuesday March 11, 2008
Another year, another Austin Powers movie. And that means 30 very funny minutes surrounded by 60 minutes of far less funny jokes about body parts and body functions, primarily those relating to th...
This movie is only slightly behind "Phantom Menace" in anticipation and excitement among kids, but parents need to know that it is very, very, very raunchy, with incessant and prolonged sexual humo...
Writer/director Baz Luhrmann is known for his surprises. In
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Posted on Tuesday March 3, 2009
NOTE: The DVD being released this week is a stripped-down 2D version. Later this year there will be another release with many more extras.
Writer-director-producer James Cameron ("Titanic," "Term...
A true story that is both touching and thrilling and tons of talent on both sides of the camera are enough to make this a good movie, but not enough to make it a great one.
It is in part th...
Malcolm Sayer, a shy neurologist (Robin Williams), is assigned to work with patients for the first time after his research funding is cut off. His patients, all but catatonic, are in a ward called ...
Parents should know that this is a very sad movie with themes that may be disturbing to some audience members. Characters use brief strong language.
Families who see this movie shoul...
8 Ways to Avoid Ministry Burnout Use these 8 tips to avoid burning out in ministry.
Why Fellowship is Crucial to Your Faith Is there such a thing as a ‘Lone Ranger Christian?'
God Will Fight for You! The Almighty defends His children, says author Beth Guckenberger in ...
17 Ways to Empower Yourself You CAN empower yourself, step by step, with patience and ...
20 Ways to Bless Others Blessings come in many different ways. Here are 20 ways to be a ...
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7 Inspiring Lessons You Can Learn from Tom Hanks We can learn a lot from the respected and greatly admired actor Tom ...
10 Ways to Bring Summer Inside It's blooming out there. If you can't get outside and enjoy it as ...
10 Steps to Discipline Happiness is a matter of personal discipline. Here are ten steps to ...
The 7 Habits of Stress-Free People Need to find ways to stop stressing? Here are 7 things that you can ...
7 Secrets to Finding Fulfilling Work There’s nothing worse than hating your job, agrees author Roman ...
10 Steps to Calmer Parenting Remaining calm is good for our own mental health but also a wonderful ...
10 Questions to Ask Before Getting into a New Relationship If you feel like you keep trying and failing with each new ...
