Movies starring Jan

Tammy is a road trip movie and, like many road trip movies, it embraces a meandering, aimless tone. It's often said for films of this sort that it's the journey that matters, not the destination. Unfortunately, in this case, neither is worth the pr...

The Ten is a comedy about the unlikeliest of subjects: The Ten Commandments. When I use the term "comedy," I do so loosely. This is one of those films where the humor is of the hit-and-miss variety, and it misses more often than it hits. The jok...

Note: This review contains "casting-related spoilers." Terminator: Salvation does not seem like a Terminator movie, at least when compared to what we have experienced from filmmakers James Cameron (The Terminator, Terminator 2: Judgment Day) and...

The Roses is not a remake of the 1989 film The War of the Roses, which starred Michael Douglas, Kathleen Turner, and Danny DeVito (and was directed by DeVito), although both movies draw from the same source material: Warren Adler’s novel. Di...

This Is Where I Leave You is a card-carrying member of the "family reunion" category of motion pictures wherein circumstances bring together characters whose once-close relationships have grown distant over the years. The mechanism by which this ha...

"Blue, liberty; White, equality; Red, fraternity... We looked very closely at these three ideas, how they functioned in everyday life, but from an individual's point of view. These ideals are contradictory with human nature. When you deal with th...

Time and time again throughout Terry Gilliam's career, the director has been forced to endure studio interference. According to executives at some of the companies that have distributed the former Monty Python animator's films, his creative vision...

The Time Traveler's Wife is a conventional adaptation of an unconventional novel. That's not necessarily a bad thing - screenwriter Bruce Joel Rubin and director Robert Schwentke (Flightplan) impose structure on a story that, in Audrey Niffenegger...

Since Edmond Rostand first committed the play to paper in 1897, Cyrano De Bergerac has become a reliable romantic formula. From the various "straight" versions to Steve Martin's Roxanne, and now The Truth About Cats and Dogs, the concept of a smar...

For a while, The Unborn unfolds like a nice little PG-13 horror film should: a dash of atmosphere, a heroine who spends lots of time in her underwear, a general sense of enhanced creepiness, and an effective "boo!" moment or two. Then it commits a...