Movies starring Jan

The typical Garry Marshall film (Pretty Woman, Raising Helen) can be classified by a few words: contrived, insipid, and predictable. Georgia Rule, while not the worst work Marshall has done, is a limp misfire. There are moments during the course ...

Gigantic is an offbeat romantic comedy that almost - but not quite - works. The characters and situations are a little too quirky for their own good. Everyone is skewed off-center and, while that can be charming in small measures, Gigantic overdo...

Combine the talents of director Robert Altman and actors Kenneth Branagh and Robert Duvall, and you have the apparent recipe for a motion picture worth waiting for. But, although The Gingerbread Man is a finely-tuned example of mainstream entertai...

Having recently given up one franchise (the James Bond one), Daniel Craig wasted no time jumping feet-first into another. Although Rian Johnson’s Knives Out, which introduced Craig as super-sleuth Benoit Blanc, arrived in theaters in advance of ...

Like everything else, James Bond (Pierce Brosnan) has had to change for the nineties. The venerable 007, coming off a long hiatus, has taken on his sixth face (the other five being Sean Connery, David Niven, George Lazenby, Roger Moore, and T...

When the usage of drones (officially "unmanned combat aerial vehicles") for bombing and surveillance entered the national conversation during the latter years of the last century, the general reaction was positive. The argument was that, by...

Has it really been twenty years since John Carpenter's low-budget chiller, Halloween, hit the nation's screens and paved the way for a decade's worth of bloody slasher movies? To date, the original Halloween has been one of the few entries into ...

Anyone who saw Todd Solondz's breakthrough feature film, Welcome to the Dollhouse, has the kernel of an idea about what to expect from the director's latest effort, the ironically-titled Happiness. Welcome to the Dollhouse is a dark comedy tha...

Harriet Tubman’s story as presented in Kasi Lemmons’ new feature, Harriet, is inspirational and crowd-pleasing. One of the most heroic figures on the mid-19th century abolitionist movement and the best remembered conductor on the Undergrou...

Perhaps the greatest benefit offered by The Help is that it aids in remembering. Race relations have changed so radically in America over the last half-century that it's difficult for today's young to grasp how contentious and hate-filled things we...