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It would be impossible to write a review of this film without discussing the title. How many viewers will see Julianna Lavin's feature debut because it's called Live Nude Girls? And how many will avoid it for the same reason? There's little doub...

If nothing else, the film’s title is accurate – this is indeed a tale of Lost Girls and Love Hotels. As much an exploration of the two faces of Japan as it is a chronicle of the sordid tragedy of one woman, the film suffers from an overly-...

At first glance, one could assume this is just another "cancer romance", but such a glib description does Me and Earl and the Dying Girl a disservice. As brought to the screen by director Alfonso Romez-Rejon and writer Jesse Andrews (adapti...

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...

Mean Girls, like 2023’s The Color Purple, is a reminder of Hollywood’s ongoing taste for self-cannibalism. Not content merely to take a known property and send it to the stage as a musical, the industry has taken the play, re-made it as a movi...

Romantic comedies are fantasies. They invite us to fall in love with the main characters as they fall in love with each other. That's difficult to accomplish when viewers find themselves actively disliking those characters. How is it possible to...

I once wrote that the only thing as necessary to a superhero movie as a nasty villain is a love interest. With My Super Ex-Girlfriend, director Ivan Reitman has shifted the focus away from the former and onto the latter. The twist here is that th...

At first glance, My Week with Marilyn might seem like a salacious behind-the-scenes look at a mostly forgotten (yet high profile at the time) movie that had its share of off-camera drama. However, a closer examination of the film reveals an incompl...

Historical dramas aren't as popular as they were during the years when they were routinely clogging Oscar nomination lists and taking home awards, so it's a source of curiosity every time one comes out to see what concessions have been made to incr...

Shopgirl, directed by Anand Tucker (Hilary and Jackie) from a screenplay by Steve Martin (adapting his novella), ventures into Lost in Translation territory. Although the relationships in this film are overtly romantic and sexual (as opposed to wha...