Ever have the feeling that when your day starts off on the wrong foot, it’s going to be one stumble after the next, until you can go to bed and get a fresh start the following morning? That’s what ha
Kids who love “Frozen” owe a big thank-you to the Disney staffers who made “101 Dalmatians.” Animation had grown to be such an expensive proposition that it took 600 people to bring the previous f
In 2007, a British audiologist named S.J. Watson wrote a psychological thriller about a woman with amnesia who, like the protagonist in “50 First Dates,” could not build short term memories because th
I fully stand by my review of season one of “Banshee” and season two stays right on course with all the violence and sex that Cinemax can throw at you. It is apparent some lessons were learned from th
It had to happen. With so many gritty, sex-filled dramas on cable TV and with prostitutes taking center stage in such series as “Deadwood,” you knew that eventually there’d be a melodrama set entirel
I caught “My Winnipeg” (2007) at its debut screening at the Toronto International Film Festival. After the screening, the first question to director Guy Maddin was from a man who introduced himself as
The woman is a joyful eccentric, full of fanciful stories and extravagant behavior. The man is her opposite, a surly homebody with a curmudgeon’s disdain for the outside world. Still grieving the loss
Ursula K. Le Guin fans won’t recognize her Earthsea series in this 2006 Studio Ghibli animated adaptation—at least that’s what Le Guin thinks. And Hayao Miyazaki was of the opinion that his son, Goro,
“The Judge” is a relatively simple film that wants you to think that it is more complicated. To do this, it drops in multiple subplots that have all reared their ugly heads in prior similar titles
I've figured out by now that I simply have nothing useful to say about screwball comedies. I don't like them. I have watched more than half of the supposed very best of the genre and I don't find a si
The period drama juggernaut "Downton Abbey" rolls on in Season 5, and creator Julian Fellowes has programmed in some minor course corrections addressing the several disappointments of Season 4. Don’t
What do you get when you cross “Casablanca” with “The Sun Also Rises,” “The Dawn Patrol,” and “Beauty and the Beast”? If you animate it and throw in your own vision (and a few seaplane pirates), you