Movies starring Idina Menzel

It’s unclear why the filmmakers felt we needed another Cinderella adaptation, especially one with such an amateurish, made-for-TV aesthetic. It’s not as if there hasn’t been a recent one – Kenneth Branagh’s live-action version is only...

In their follow-up to the underrated Good Time, the Safdie Brothers (Benny and Josh) have shown that the some of the most forceful qualities evident in their previous film were more trademarks than one-off experiments. Uncut Gems, although ver...

For many years, Disney resisted the urge to craft big-budget sequels to popular animated films. During the “second wave” years of the 1990s, a cottage industry was born whereby cut-rate direct-to-home video follow-ups were made but the stu...

For the briefest of moments, while watching Frozen, I felt like I was back in the early '90s, experiencing one of the memorable early "second wave" of Disney animated films. The sensation passed quickly - Frozen is, after all, in 3-D and uses CGI (...

Once upon a time, Disney was the king of animation. Today, in the realm of CGI and 3D, they remain at the top only by virtue of a partnership with Pixar. Hand-drawn animation - the kind responsible for many of Disney's most beloved classics - is ...

For Ask the Dust, director Robert Towne, adapting the novel by John Fante, has returned to the time and place of his greatest cinematic endeavor: Los Angeles in the 1930s. The setting, however, is the only similarity between Ask the Dust and China...

Memo to director Chris Columbus: In most cases, it's a bad idea for a movie to be a direct representation of a play. "Opening up" the setting is sometimes not all that's necessary to make a stage production into something cinematic. In a theater...