I saw Chicken Run immediately after sitting through the two hour bombardment of toilet humor in Me, Myself, & Irene. Chicken Run is everything the latter is not: clever, innovative, and funny. And here's a flash for parents who would like to sit through a G-rated film for children and not have their intelligenc...
"Evita'' allows the audience to identify with a heroine who achieves greatness by--well, golly, by being who she is. It celebrates the life of a woman who begins as a quasi-prostitute, marries a powerful man, locks him out of her bedroom, and inspires the idolatry of the masses by spending enormous sums on...
My four year old daughter, Lauren enjoyed the "100 Acre Woods Challenge" game. It is simple enough for her to play by herself using the DVD remote control. She also enjoyed the "Tigger" sing along and storybook. The storybook feature is a great way to combine watching TV and reading. Eeyore has al...
Rutt and Tuke (Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas a.k.a. Bob and Doug McKenzie) reprise their roles as a couple of dimwitted moose in this sequel to Disney's Brother Bear. But they aren't the only things in this animation that may seem familiar. Picking up shortly after the last movie ended, Kenai (the boy-turned-be...
The Best Picture winner of 1979, the film that defeated "Apocalypse Now" and "All That Jazz" for the Oscar, has largely been diminished since that time, undoubtedly because the domestic dilemma at its core is no longer quite as timely or as pertinent. All the same, the Robert Benton adaptation of Av...
Although it was made over a decade ago, Sam Raimi's Darkman remains the closest Hollywood has come to capturing the unique spirit of comic books on film. Directed with great style by the then up-and-coming cult moviemaker Raimi, Darkman puts all of the medium's hallmarks on vibrant display. And because the titu...
Slick as hell. Hoo boy, this movie is slick. When I say slick, I mean in the way that it looks and feels, and the way that it's instantly forgettable once you leave the theater. It's popcorn, pure and simple, but it works. Ed Harris plays a general who's disenfranchised with the military. He swipes some n...
Aug. 3, 2001 | Garry Marshall's "The Princess Diaries" is so aggressively bland and inoffensive that it practically recedes from the screen -- it's like an obsequious houseguest who keeps reiterating that, really, we mustn't go to a lick of trouble on her account. After a while -- about eight minu...
An epic interpretation of the forces which shaped Gandhi and how these filtered into his relationship with India, Gandhi portrays a man of deep simplicity. In the South Africa of 1893, casual racism and discrimination is forcefully embedded into the culture. Unfortunately Mohandas K. Gandhi (Ben Kingsley), fresh from s...
Now that the Christmas movie season has been taken over by big-budget prestige pictures and elephantine dazzlers designed to sweep in massive crowds, there's almost no such thing as an entertaining holiday trifle anymore -- the kind of casual, cheerful little picture that you might see on a whim (admittedly a whim ...