Sex and the City, the movie, feels like a glorified television episode in the best possible sense — utterly unchanged in spirit from its small screen roots yet just ambitious enough to validate its big screen adaptation. For the uninitiated, the film is unlikely to inspire, but for fans of the Emmy-winning HBO series, I […]

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The Strangers has no plot to speak of. It can be summed up in one word: survival. Supposedly based on a true story, the film follows the events of a single night in which James Hoyt (Scott Speedman) and Kristen McKay (Liv Tyler) pay a visit to the secluded Hoyt vacation home. Playing off universal […]

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This is an abridged version of a review I wrote for Christianity Today Movies. To read the rest of this review, click here.
The Children of Huang Shi is a bit of an odd duck for a summer release — a thoughtful, true-life historical drama tucked conspicuously into a season of explosions, guns, computer generated monsters […]

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If you take away nothing else from this review, please remember this: do yourself a favor and dampen your expectations. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull cannot possibly be as good as you dream it will be. Even if — especially if — every critic in the nation gushed in unbridled adoration, […]

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This is an abridged version of a review I wrote for Christianity Today Movies. To read the rest of this review, click here.
Weird and wonderful, The Fall is nothing short of a contemporary The Wizard of Oz, a hypnotic and intoxicating tale of ravishing beauty and spellbinding imagination.

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Why is it that so many beautiful period films are also bloodless lumps of emotionless clay? Why is it that so many directors choose to rely on their impeccable and deservedly spectacular visuals but completely ignore the fact that without engaging characters we might as well be watching a National Geographic special? Before the Rains […]

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When Speed Racer works, it is like nothing you have ever seen. And when it careens off the track, cartwheels end over end through the air and disintegrates upon impact with the hard, unforgiving earth, it is still like nothing you have ever seen. I’m not saying I liked the film, but I have to […]

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Were it not for some of the more mature subject matter, I’d strongly suspect that a rabble of feral children, abandoned on a desert island well before completing middle school and weaned only on episodes of Punk’d, wrote What Happens in Vegas. If you’re looking for a film that, at the very least pretends to […]

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I am on record for bemoaning the black hole into which good children’s films have disappeared. When I was growing up in the 80s, movies like The Goonies and The Explorers fired my imagination and created worlds of excitement and adventure in which children had it within themselves to conquer pirates and outer space all […]

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If you’ve been wondering where Helen Hunt has been hiding these past few years, the answer is behind the camera. Hunt has been indulging in her passion project, Then She Found Me, a small, graceful film adapted from Elinor Lipman’s novel of the same name. Hunt’s feature directing debut (she also produced, co-wrote and stars […]

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