For most of its length, “Playing for Keeps” inhabits an idyllic world where the weather is sunny, the cars are red Ferraris, and the soccer moms are Jessica Biel, Uma Thurman and Catherine Zeta-Jones.
“A Royal Affair” is not as racy as it sounds. This highly polished costume drama is exceptionally well-made and a model of intelligent restraint, but it also is unapologetically earnest and a bit on the bloodless side.
‘Miracle on 34th Street” at Tacoma Little Theatre is a feel-good holiday show that asks audiences to suspend critical judgment along with disbelief. It is a touching reaffirmation of faith (which is defined as “believing when common sense tells you not to”) and a still-relevant send-up of the commercialization of Christmas – much more relevant today, in fact, than when the story is set, a time when rampant commercialism was just beginning to creep into the holiday.
Guys in cars, talking. Guys in bars, talking.
A few years ago, audiences watched in horror as Arkin (Josh Stewart) endured all manner of torture in Marcus Dunstan’s “The Collector.” Now audiences get the chance to cheer/squirm along as Arkin exacts revenge in Dunstan’s follow-up, “The Collection.”
“Anna Karenina” rewires Tolstoy’s classic tale of marriage-wrecking, reputation-ruining passion into a streamlined, sexy and playfully satirical 21st-century design. It’s an eye-popping marriage of artifice and heart.
A different kind of quirky love story Movies about the mentally ill tend to render them in cute, charming strokes – with only the occasional blast of ugly to remind us, “Oh yeah, this gorgeous, lovelorn soul is still crazy.”
Yann Martel’s fantastical folk parable about faith and spirituality makes the journey to the big screen more or less intact in “Life of Pi,” a meditative Ang Lee film with many of the same virtues and shortcomings of the novel.
Was anybody out there clamoring for a remake of “Red Dawn”? Show of hands? Anybody?
You can’t simply warn them. They can’t see it. They won’t. They’re young. They’re immortal.
DreamWorks Animation president Jeffrey Katzenberg recently lamented the dearth of holiday-themed movies headed to your multiplex this year. But in foisting “Rise of the Guardians” upon unsuspecting audiences for the holidays, it’s clear he just wanted some cover. Other holiday films would take some of the pressure off this joyless, soul-dead piffle.
It’s the week of Thanksgiving, and in the world of movies, that means the start of the holiday movie season, when most films hoping to snag Oscars open in theaters. Here are brief reviews of the five movies opening today to capitalize on the long Thanksgiving weekend. Read more about the films in Friday’s entertainment section.
Finally – finally! – the “Twilight” franchise embraces its own innate absurdity with the gleefully over-the-top conclusion, “The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 2.”
Even after all this time, author Stephenie Meyer, the mother of three who became an overnight literary sensation with the 2005 publication of her young-adult novel “Twilight,” can’t explain the phenomenon that surrounds the grand romance between vampire Edward Cullen and human teenager Bella Swan, played on-screen by Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart.
In a nighttime downpour, two black Union troopers, survivors of a fierce opening battle scene in Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln,” brace President Abraham Lincoln (Daniel Day-Lewis) with stinging observations about the indignity of not being paid the same as their white comrades and other examples of their unequal treatment in the Army and in Northern society.
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