Reviews
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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A |
**** |
+1|
Kids & Up
Riveting, downbeat, and full of surprises, John Huston’s
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is both a gripping adventure and one of Hollywood’s best and most resonant morality tales, a smart and remorseless story of gold, greed, guns, and guile in the mountains of Mexico.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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C- |
*** |
-2|
Adults
It kills me to say it, but give the devil his due: James Cameron is the king of the world.
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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.
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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).
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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.
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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.
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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.
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A- |
***½ |
+1|
Teens & Up
Like the similarly sweaty, claustrophobic
12 Angry Men nine years later, John Huston’s
Key Largo is a rare adaptation of a stage play in which the physical constraints of the stagebound source material are a strength rather than a weakness.
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B+ |
*** |
+0|
Teens & Up
Howard Hawks’s more or less in-name-only adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s “worst novel,” has more in common with
Casablanca (including nearly half a dozen players) than with its ostensible source material. Its real claim to fame, though, is the first pairing of Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, who appeared together in only three other films but remained ever after linked off the screen.
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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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B |
*** |
+2-1|
Kids & Up*
Gregory Peck’s star-making turn as Father Francis Chisom in John M. Stahl’s
The Keys of the Kingdom earned him a Best Actor nod and established his screen persona as a ruggedly decent, dignified underdog.
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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.
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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.
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B+ |
***½ |
+1-1|
Teens & Up
Superman II isn’t perfect, but in the annals of comic-book movies it remains an indispensable touchstone.
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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+ |
*** |
+1|
Kids & Up
Cars is Pixar’s most improbable success to date, a film that could easily have misfired, but somehow does not.
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C+ |
**½ |
-1|
Kids & Up*
Somebody has to say it: Made at the height of Disney’s early brilliance alongside
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,
Fantasia,
Pinocchio, and
Bambi,
Dumbo is the odd weak link in the chain.
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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.
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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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