Reviews
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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.
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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.
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A- |
***½ |
+0|
Teens & Up
A classic tribute to an American pop-culture icon,
Superman is the first great comic-book movie and a nostalgic ode to the ideals of a more innocent time.
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B+ |
*** |
+0|
Kids & Up*
Highlights include daredevil cartwheeling baboons, the
remarkable partnership of the badger and the honey-guide bird,
and the astonishingly intricate lengths to which the Kalahari
bushmen go to find water. There’s a sequence with the animal
residents of the fertile Kavango flood plains intoxicated on
fermented fruit, and footage of an ostrich mating dance that
strikingly resembles Fantasia’s animated ostrich
ballet.
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B |
**½ |
+2|
Kids & Up*
The story starts a bit stiffly with the tale of Arthur’s rise
to power, beginning with the adult Arthur (Mel Ferrer) and rival
Mordred (Stanley Baker) meeting at the sword in the stone with
their respective advocates, Merlin (Felix Aylmer) and Morgan le
Fey (Anne Crawford). Things improve with the arrival of Lancelot
(Robert Taylor), who even before meeting Arthur is willing to die
for him and his ideals of chivalry, courtesy, and virtue.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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).
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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A- |
***½ |
+1|
Teens & Up
Audrey Hepburn is utterly beguiling in her star-making role opposite Gregory Peck in
Roman Holiday, a delightful romantic comedy about a poised young princess of an unspecified European country who spends a magical day with an American reporter (Gregory Peck) in the Eternal City, playing hooky from her official duties.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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B+ |
***½ |
+0|
Teens & Up
This time out the boys take their Road act to
Arabian Nights territory, where, as usual, they sing
(especially Bing), crack wise (especially Bob), and vie over
Lamour, who again has an agenda of her own. The story, which is
taken about as seriously as the plot of a typical Looney Tunes
cartoon, has Bing and Bob shipwrecked and washed up on the road
to Morocco.
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B |
*** |
+0|
Teens & Up
Beaucaire (Hope) is barber to Louis XV of France — until the
former’s romantic altercations with a chambermaid named Mimi
(Joan Caulfield) inadvertently result in banishment for both Mimi
and himself. At the same time, the king finds it expedient to rid
the court of the Duc le Chandre, a renowned swordsman and
celebrated ladies’ man, by making a political marriage between le
Chandre and Princess Maria of Spain (Marjorie Reynolds).
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B+ |
***½ |
+0|
Teens & Up
One of Bob Hope’s best comic-thriller
vehicles,
My Favorite Blonde benefits from its
semi-serious spy-thriller ambiance, tolerably cogent plot,
scene-stealing penguin, and above all one of the more human, less
caricatured, less one-dimensionally narcissistic characters in
Hope’s movie
oeuvre.
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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.
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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."
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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.
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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.
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C+ |
**½ |
+0|
Kids & Up
Highlights include an ominous retelling of the story of
Blackbeard’s curse and a slapstick scene pitting the heroes
against the gangsters. Undeniably silly and somewhat dated,
Blackbeard’s Ghost remains harmless, modestly entertaining
family fare.
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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.
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