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Though not unusual for animated movies to provoke tears, Maquia: When the Promised Flower Blooms is perhaps the second animated film I would openly classify as a “tearjerker” (the first being Grave of the Fireflies). However, although ther...

March of the Penguins does what all good National Geographic documentaries do: it informs and entertains while providing interesting wildlife footage. Unfortunately, it's not cinematic. The issue isn't whether the film is worth seeing, but whethe...

Apparently, I approached this production with a misapprehension. I was under the impression that Margaret Cho: Assassin was intended to be a filmed comedic performance. What I got instead was an 85-minute political rant from a liberal Asian Ameri...

Long ago, the concept of "money" was devised as a means by which commerce could be simplified - after all, it's easier to carry around some kind of marker than cows or cattle or bags of grain. As society has evolved, however, so has the way in whic...

It's always the case that when a director does something that attracts notice (or, in some cases, notoriety), his or her next project is awaited with a degree of anticipation. This is the case with Noah Baumbach, whose The Squid and the Whale, whi...

When applied to an animal, the term "mule" refers to a beast of burden - a slow, plodding, stupid creature whose sole asset is that it can transport large amounts of cargo without choice or complaint. When applied to a human being, the word means ...

Three adjectives spring to mind when describing Marie Antoinette: odd, irritating, and tedious. (The last in that list could be replaced by "boring.") This is a movie that never gets to the point, perhaps because it doesn't recognize what the point...

For more than 30 years, one of the great mysteries of journalism and politics was the identity of Woodward & Bernstein’s key Watergate source, “Deep Throat.” Between Deep Throat’s period of contribution (1972-73) and his voluntary unma...

Want to see a grown man cry? Take him to Marley & Me. Based on the best-selling and beloved memoir by former Philadelphia Inquirer columnist John Grogan, the movie ends in such a way that ensures there won't be a dry eye in the theater. By turns...

I have never been a Raymond Chandler fan nor am I enamored with the pulp detective genre that was oh-so-popular during the early decades of the 20th century. Consequently, my only exposure to Philip Marlowe (Chandler’s most popular character) ha...