This episodic story of the Smith family in the St. Louis of 1903 is based on the memoirs of Sally Benson. Its pleasures are in the period detail, the glorious songs (including standards "The Trol...
I am not a huge fan of comedies of excruciation, that genre of movies that draw much of their humor from some poor idiot's painful and humiliating loss of control. But I can appreciate the way tha...
There is a sub-category of comedy that can only be termed "comedies of excruciation," in which we laugh at the hideously humiliating experiences of some poor sap. If this is your kind of humor, th...
At times, all of us feel like strangers in the world. In Disney's bight, colorful, CGI animated film (available in 3D in some locations), Lewis (voice of Daniel Hansen) is left on the steps of an ...
Let's get it out of the way first thing. "Megamind" would be a much more enjoyable experience if it wasn't so close to one of this year's brightest family pleasures,
...
Woody Allen's latest movie has a great premise. But while it is surer and more intriguing than the arid Anything Else and Hollywood Ending, it still fails to give us characters who connect in auth...
Movies can show us visions of other worlds, exotic vistas, customs, fashions, rules. And they can show us visions of ourselves, with our longings, our fears, our dreams, the and the way love can i...
Welcome back, Mr. Smith and Mr. Jones.
The stars and director of one of the most creative and purely entertaining movies of the last 20 years are back for a third that does not match
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Posted on Thursday May 24, 2012
The original
Men in Black (1997) is one of my all-time favorite movies, just for originality and sheer attitude. Director Barry Sonnenfeld, production designer Bo Welch, and stars Tommy Le...
Carl Brashear, Jr. was the first black man to achieve the rank of Master Diver in the Navy. He was also the first amputee to be returned to active duty in the armed services. In this movie, produce...
"More of this is true than you would believe," "The Men Who Stare at Goats" cheekily informs us as it opens. And while its tone is high satire, even farce, the story it tells is not hard to believ...
The trailers for "The Messengers" don’t do it justice —
there’s a lot more potential in this movie than appears in the
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Posted on Friday February 2, 2007
Two of the biggest stars in Hollywood took pay cuts to appear in what is essentially a quirky independent movie -- with two of the biggrest stars in Hollywood. Even though Brad Pitt and Julia Robe...
The influence of acclaimed Japanese animation wizard Hayao Miyazaki is clear in “Mia and the Migoo,” an award-winning film from French director Jacques-Rémy Girerd. It has a Miyazaki-like br...
The original "Miami Vice" was Michael Mann's decade-defining television show. It ran from 1984-89 and everything about it was fresh, edgy, and influential. The t-shirt under the Armani jacket wit...
Michael Clayton (George Clooney) spends a lot of time facing into the dark midnight of the soul, his own and others'.
Late one night and early the next morning, he does both at once as he g...
Basic Movie Plot #2 is the fish out of water, and that is because it works so well. Whether we're talking about a mermaid coming to Manhattan, a guy from the Australian outback coming to Manhattan,...
Four couples sort out their romantic entanglements in Shakespeare's most magical love story. Hermia and Lysander love each other, but her father wants her to marry Demetrius. Demetrius loves Hermia...
Max (Eldon Henson), a huge boy who has flunked 7th grade twice and Kevin (Kieran Culkin), a tiny disabled boy, help each other in this moving story of the power of friendship and imagination. Inspi...
Basketball coach Cathy Rush (Carla Gugino) arrived at tiny Immaculata College in 1972, at just the right moment for her, for the team, and for the game. Restrictive rules that had "protected" femal...
The scorchingly funny guys behind "Spinal Tap," "Waiting for Guffman" and "Best in Show" have produced a kinder, gentler film that is still very, very funny.
Once again, this is a "mockumen...
"Do not just a man until you have walked a mile in his shoes," we are told, and that is the message of this understated film about a gifted pitcher who is on the autism spectrum and the minor leagu...
"My name is Harvey Milk and I want to recruit you!"
This disarming introduction became the trademark of the man who would become the first out gay man to hold major elective office in the United ...
“Million Dollar Baby” is a strong contender, but it suffers a TKO in the last round.
At first, it is a fresh, assured, and evocative take on the classic boxing formula. A tired old tra...
A bag of money literally falls from the sky and lands on Damian (Alex Etel). It's just the most recent of a series of events that call into question everything he thought he know. He has recently...
Someday, I'd like to see a thriller in which there are no "fooled you!" fakeouts, no one that the audience thinks is dead turns out to be still alive, the characters are allowed to have actual pers...
It is fifty years from now, in Washington, D.C., where familiar landmarks like the Washington Monument are surrounded by vertical highways and where computers in The Gap not only recognize you when...
Sportscaster Al Michaels unforgettably called out "Do you believe in miracles? Yes!" as the 1980 US Olympic hockey team beat the Russians. They then went on to win the gold medal. And so the tea...
Plot: Doris Walker (Maureen O’Hara), an executive at Macy’s, is responsible for the Thanksgiving Day Parade. When the Santa Claus she has hired for the parade shows up drunk, she quickly subsit...
Today is the 142nd anniversary of the birth of one of the most extraordinary teachers in American history,
Annie Sullivan, who gave a little...
Director Tarsem Singh Dhandwar has found a story worthy of his ravishing visuals and the result is an enchanting update of the classic fairy tale of Snow White.
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A curiously distant story is surrounded by enchanting visuals and special effects in this Alice in Wonderland-style tale of a young girl who has to solve a puzzle in a magical land in order to get ...
Sandra Bullock the producer found a pretty good vehicle for Sandra Bullock the actress in this variation on the classic Hollywood "makeover movie." As in predecessors from "Cinderella" to "My Fair...
Somewhere inside this very mainstream Hollywood confection is a surprisingly subversive little bit of deconstruction. It takes a classic Cinderella theme -- the makeover that catches the attention...
Genre:
MPAA Rating: R
Audience: Adult
A smarmy premise becomes an unspeakably offensive movie in a mess that is not just disgusting but dull. I don't feel I need a bath after seeing it; I feel I need an exorcism.
Remember the song "Ce...
A delicious retro romp about a f...
As delicate as the title character's watercolors, this gentle story about the author and illustrator of
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Posted on Wednesday December 13, 2006
"The Missing" is a disappointment, relentlessly politically correct and even more relentlessly bleak and brutal.
Cate Blanchett plays Maggie, one of those indomitable frontier women who can...
At this point, the impossible mission may be finding some way to make this story work once more.
That Lalo Schifrin score still jumps and in this version there is a propulsive shot of percus...
Director Brian DePalma is known for movies that have two qualities -- striking visual flair and frustrating narrative incoherence. If you are the kind of person who talks about the plot on the way ...
Summer has arrived. "Mission Impossible 2" is the essence of a summer movie: gorgeous stars, sensational stunts, nerve-wracking chases, steamy romance, some "gotcha" plot twists, and lots of explo...
If you can't make it to Virginia today for the annual swimming of the ponies, take a look at this faithful adaptation of the classic (and fact-based) children's book Misty of Chincoteague, by Margu...
Plot: This Chaplin classic (he produced, wrote, directed, starred, and composed the music) is about two people struggling with the isolation of the industrial era. Chaplin (simply called "A worker"...
In "Mona Lisa Smile," a vibrant and independent-minded teacher shows her students a paint-by-numbers kit for a Van Gogh picture to demonstrate the difference between art that is insightful and mean...
The new movie from the people behind "James and the Giant Peach" and "A Nightmare Before Christmas" has some of the same trademark visual inventiveness, but this is no children’s story.
"M...
Aileen Wuornos peers into the murky mirror of the gas station bathroom. Somewhere in that lumpy, mottled face, she catches a glimpse of a girl who dreamed of being admired and cared for. We glimp...
"Monster's Ball" is the derisive term the prison guards use for the gruesome ceremonies the night before a death row prisoner is to be executed. In the movie of that name, Hank (Billy Bob Thornton...
Jane Fonda is having such a blast being back on screen in a pull-out-all-the-stops performance that it seems a little stingy not to enjoy it more. But this latest variation on Meet the Parents and...
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Posted on Tuesday December 18, 2012
It's the Princess and the Pauper with Disney star Selena Gomez and two Gossip Girls in a story about a Texas waitress who takes the place of a selfish heiress in the glamorous title city. There's ...
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Posted on Thursday May 31, 2012
We love those disheveled but indomitable women of the television world, from Holly Hunter in "Broadcast News" to Mary Tyler Moore in her iconic 1970's television series, Tina Fey in "30 Rock," a...
This sunny documentary about a sailboat race across the Pacific Ocean is a bit of a throwback to the days when a night at the movies included some cartoons, a newsreel, and a travelogue. It has a ...
Rodrigo García, who showed great taste, restraint, and sensitivity in telling the intertwined lives of women in "Nine Stories" and "Things You Can Tell Just from Looking At Her" shows less of all ...
I really tried to go with this attempt at a creepy thriller, but found it impossible to be either creeped or thrilled.
Richard Gere stars as John Klein, a star Washington Post political repo...
This is a big overstuffed everything- and the kitchen sink mess of a movie. It is an ambitious, often gorgeous, occasionally brilliant mess. But for all its superficial abundance, there is an es...
Can This Marriage Be Saved? (With apologies to the Ladies' Home Journal)
John's turn: We got married before we really knew each other. Now I wonder whether we'll ever know each other. She...
Bernie Mac doesn't hit this one out of the park, but he manages a solid double in his first starring role, as a retired baseball player who has to get back into shape and suit up for three more hit...
I have to give this film credit for embracing its craziness. This is one movie that proudly raises its freak flag high and lets it wave. But that does not mean it works.
Mr. Brooks (Kevin...
I may be too old for Adam Sandler movies, but it seems to me that he’s getting too old for them, too.
Sandler really brings out my "Mom" side – I want to tell him to stand up straight, s...
Longfellow Deeds (Gary Cooper), of Mandrake Falls, Vermont, is a quiet bachelor who writes rhymes for birthday cards and plays the tuba for concentration. Informed that he has inherited twenty mill...
There's nothing harder to get right in a movie than whimsy. And there are fe...
It used to be that a comedian who wanted to be in movies had to make an armed services comedy. Now, we stick them in domestic stories about daddies who need to learn that the family is more impor...
Plot: Naive Jefferson Smith (Jimmy Stewart) is sent to Washington to serve the remaining term of a Senator who has died. The governor (Guy Kibbee), and businessman Jim Taylor (Edward Arnold) believ...
If Sophocles knew that this would be the result, he would never have allowed "Oedipus" to see the light of day. "Mr. Woodcock" is an Oedipal comedy about a man who loves his mother and who becomes...
Mrs. Palfrey (Joan Plowright) did not think of herself as someone who would live in the shabby gentility of the Claremont, a residential hotel in London. We never learn the details of what brought...
Disney's 1998 animated feature is based on the legend of Mulan, a Chinese girl who helps the Chinese army defeat the Mongols. After the Mongols invade, led by Shan-Yu (voice of Miguel Ferrar) every...
If you like movies that make sense, don't go anywhere near "Mulholland Drive." If you like to come out of the theater saying, "Oh, I get it -- he was just pretending to shoot the other guy!" this ...
This is a cleverly updated version of a 1930's movie staple -- a genial small-town comedy with eccentric but endearing characters and a leading man who is not what he pretends to be. Loren Dean pla...
It may still be spring outdoors, but this is the first summer movie of the year. Grab some popcorn and settle in for some old-fashioned movie fun, the best in this genre since the gold standard of...
This movie is an animated and more kid-friendly version of the stories in the action-packed thrillers "The Mummy" and "The Mummy Returns" -- a Saturday-morning-cartoon-style version of the adventur...
Salt the popcorn and settle your gigantic soda in the cup-holder. Brendan Fraser is back and just as important, so are the mummies. Strictly speaking, these guys are not mummies, but they're clos...
Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meier said, "I can forgive them for killing my children. I cannot forgive them for forcing my children to kill theirs."
At the 1972 Olympic games in Munich, ther...
Like all Muppet movies, this latest entry has plenty of jokes to keep the parents happy while the kids are enjoying the story. This time, the story focuses on a question that has intrigued Muppet f...
In 1924 there was a murder was so shocking that it was called the crime of the century. What was chilling was the motive -- not money or passion but a cool arrogance that led two wealthy young men...
You know those thousands of heartwarming, triumph of the human spirit, disease-of-the-week movies? With heroes and heroines who suffer through every possible medical catastrophe and become better ...
The latest film by writer/director/actor Albert Brooks has him portraying Steven Phillips, a Hollywood screenwriter who is let go by the studio when a young, arrogant executive tells him he has los...
Comedy that is actually funny plus romance that is actually sweet equals a sunny little valentine to brighten the winter doldrums. And -- I can't help saying it -- Hugh Grant and Drew Barrymore go...
Plot: "Professor" Harold Hill (Robert Preston) is a con man posing as a salesman of band instruments and uniforms. He happens upon River City, a small town in Iowa. As the citizens explain in song,...
Those out there who are still hoping for Lloyd Dobler to stand outside their window holding up a boombox playing "In Your Eyes" may be glad to hear that a movie that tries to be Say Anything, Part ...
Genre:
MPAA Rating:
Audience: Adult
A generation ago the technology first became widely available to allow families to document their lives with home movies and audio recordings. The use of these artifacts has transcended the "can y...
The story behind this film is as remarkable as the film itself. Actress/writer Nia Vardalos created a one-woman show about her Greek family and their response when she married a man who wasn't Gre...
In "My Boss's Daughter," Tom (Ashton Kutcher) and Lisa (Tara Reid) bond over hating the same movie. I predict that everyone unfortunate enough to see this atrocity will similarly bond over the exp...
This is a good, old-fashioned boy and his dog movie, based on the memoir of Willie Morris, who grew up in 1940's Mississippi, a small, sleepy town of "ten thousand souls and nothing to do." It is l...
The commercial for this movie features our heroes (the visiting Martian and his earthling friend) in the midst of a car chase. The Martian (Christopher Lloyd) shrinks the car, which goes into the s...
Plot: Ingemar is a twelve year old boy growing up in 1950s Sweden who goes to live with his aunt and uncle in Smaland while his mother is dying of tuberculosis. In the small town of Smaland he meet...
Everything that made the adorable "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" so winning is missing from this tired and formulaic sitcom of a movie about an American tour guide in Greece. "My Big Fat Greek Wedding...
A young wife and mother finds out she has two months to live. She makes a list of the things she wants to do before she dies, like recording birthday greetings for her two daughters for each year ...
How far would you go to save your child's life? How far should you go? Those are the questions posed -- and largely ducked -- in this film based on the best-selling book,
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Posted on Thursday June 25, 2009
Even with a face contorted with rage and vengeance and a voice echoing through the streets of New York as well as the theater, it’s difficult not to like Uma Thurman as the needy, controlling and...
"Her skin does not reject the light."
That was impressionist painter Pierre Auguste Renoir's answer when asked why he used one favorite model so many times. And it describes the luminous beaut...
This semi-successful attempt at a post-modern comic-book style story that has it both ways, archly commenting on superhero sagas while actually giving us a new and cooler version of one at the same...
The coming attraction makes it clear that "Mystery, Alaska" is your basic "Rocky" movie about a grown-up version of the Mighty Ducks -- a team from a small, hockey-worshipping Alaska town gets a ch...
"Looks like damaged goods to me," says a character at the beginning of this movie, and that could refer to everyone we will meet in a story that explores the impact of an unbearable tragedy on two ...
Do You Believe in Miracles? Take some time this week to help someone else. Surprise someone with ...
10 Exercises to Stay Spiritually Fit Get spiritually fit with our 10 tips!
20 Scriptures That Bring Hope to Any Situation Need a lift? Here are 20 scriptures to make you feel better in any ...
5 Ways to Revive Your Dream! Rekindle your joy! Re-ignite your passion. Achieve your wildest ...
7 Ways to Plant Seeds of Greatness in Your Life Visit ways to plant seeds of greatness into your life. ...
20 Powerful Declarations to Fight Discouragement Speak life into your day with these 20 declarations!
5 Ways to Stay Healthy This Summer Here are five ways to remain healthy and happy during the summer!
5 Tips for Better Sleep Top sleep expert Dr. David Volpi, Founder of Eos Sleep Center has put ...
7 Top Health Issues Facing Today’s Women Here are seven top health-related issues facing today’s women and ...
Celebrities Who Won't Back Down Here are five courageous women who won’t back down when their health ...
A Conversation with Minnesota Wild Center Matt Cullen With the NHL Playoffs in full swing, Minnesota Wild center Matt ...
Yes, Gratitude Works! Having an attitude of thankfulness brings incredible, unexpected ...
10 Ways to To Handle Life Changes With Courage Here are 10 tips to help you handle the twists and turns on the road ...
The Fruits of Desire Fruits are the ultimate fast food: sweet, healthy and conveniently ...
Nurturing a Healthy Marriage For many couples, years of marriage can sadly lead them to a negative ...
10 Ways to Get Over a Hurtful Past Has someone hurt you? Use these tips to move forward.
Ten Things Every Dad Should Tell His Son Being a father has never been more difficult. It's is a tough world ...
