Reviews
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A |
**** |
+1-1|
Teens & Up
Like the heroines of
The Awful Truth and
His Girl
Friday, Katherine Hepburn plays a divorcée caught
between flawed ex-husband Cary Grant and a respectable but
somehow unsuitable fiancé (John Howard). But
The
Philadelphia Story goes beyond the formula by throwing in
surprise contender Jimmy Stewart as a disgruntled
novelist-reporter — an unexpected source of conflict and
uncertainty that eliminates the need for Grant to resort to the
underhanded tricks he needed to show up his rivals in
Awful
Truth and
Girl Friday.
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A+ |
***½ |
+4|
Kids & Up
Based on the historical novel by Jewish author
Franz Werfel, the beloved classic
The Song of Bernadette
stands head and shoulders over most religiously themed fare from
Hollywood’s golden age.
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B+ |
***½ |
+0|
Teens & Up
A classic satirical action-comedy Western,
Destry Rides Again pits mild-mannered sheriff’s deputy Jimmy Stewart — a reverse type of the typical John-Wayne two-fisted straight-shooting cowboy hero — against a lawless town full of swindlers and murderers where sheriffs tend to wind up dead.
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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.
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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?
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B+ |
***½ |
+0|
Teens & Up
In a conceit both touching and surreal, Kelly plays an
American ex-G.I. in Paris who’s never wanted anything but to
paint, though he’s obviously the best hoofer in France.
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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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A+ |
**** |
+2|
Teens & Up
The result of this somewhat haphazard collaboration is a breathtaking creative synergy, a perfect storm in which everything happened to come together with magical rightness. The sparkling script balances wittily cynical dialogue, weepy sentimentalism and clear-eyed idealism. The characters that matter are credibly, even seriously flawed, yet remain deeply sympathetic and open to redemption. The tightly crafted plot is at once intricate and elegant, at turns rollicking and stirring, and the snappy storytelling doesn’t come at the expense of rich, moody atmosphere. The top-notch cast are at the top of their games, and the timeless score accents a classic wartime melodrama that hasn’t lost a thing as time goes by.
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A- |
***½ |
+0|
Teens & Up
Often described as "the best Hitchcock movie
Hitchcock never made,"
Charade stars Cary Grant and Audrey
Hepburn in a sparkling thriller with overtones of screwball
romantic comedy — or is it the other way around?
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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.
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A- |
***½ |
+3|
Teens & Up
Not to be confused with any version of the story of Dr. Kimble and the one-armed man, this
Fugitive is director John Ford’s underrated adaptation of Catholic novelist Graham Greene’s masterpiece
The Power and the Glory.
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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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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 >
B+ |
***½ |
+0|
Teens & Up
Unlike the similarly titled Capra comedies
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and
Mr. Deeds Goes to
Town — which centered on simple, honest rural folk colliding
with urban disingenuity —
Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream
House is about the foibles and woes of an urban family whose
disjointed lifestyle leads them to fumblingly seek a better life
in the countryside.
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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.
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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.
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A- |
***½ |
+2|
Kids & Up*
One of the best WWII-era WWII movies,
Sahara is a thoroughly entertaining war actioner starring Humphrey Bogart as a tough American sergeant commanding a tank crew in the Libyan desert.
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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 |
-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.
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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.
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D |
**½ |
-3|
Adults*
(Written by Robert Jackson) What do you get for the man who has everything?
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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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B+ |
*** |
+0|
Kids & Up*
(
Review by Jimmy Akin) The City of Townsville… is in
desperate need of heroes!
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B+ |
*** |
+0|
Kids & Up*
(Written by Jimmy Akin) Scooby-Doo was born in 1969. He was reborn
almost thirty years later, in 1998.
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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 >
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.
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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?
Read More >
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