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The Man Who Invented Christmas conflates the biography of Charles Dickens (at least until 1843) with the events of one of his seminal works, A Christmas Carol. Watching the film leads one to the conclusion that, although the story might have w...

Since the demise of Friends, Jennifer Aniston has been desperately striving to find her motion picture niche. Despite having started her fifth decade of life (in an industry that is not kind to actresses over 40), she remains a bankable name, even...

Although Mean Girls is likely to be frequently compared to Heathers, and perhaps occasionally to Election, the movie it most strongly reminds me of is 1999's Jawbreaker. All four of these films offer a darkly satirical perspective of high school a...

Recently, Spike Lee was in the news feuding with Clint Eastwood about the absence of black servicemen in Eastwood's recent Iwo Jima duology. According to Lee, Eastwood ignored history in Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima by not making...

Moneyball illustrates what can happen when a non-fiction book that's more about ideas and processes is translated into a feature film. There's a lot of fascinating information in Moneyball (although, to be fair, it's questionable how much interest...

The most inventive moment in My Favorite Martian comes during the opening sequence. A robot Mars probe is shown slowly picking its way across the barren surface of the Red Planet. When its power supply finally gives out and it grinds to a halt, t...

My Family, the portrait of a Mexican-American family living in East Los Angeles, boasts a series of distinguished thematic antecedents, including Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather and Zhang Yimou's To Live. Here, as in the 1972 gangster saga, t...