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Beware Opening Night films at film festivals. More often than not, they disappoint. Such is the case with Christine Lahti's My First Mister, which was given the undisputed honor of opening the 2001 Sundance Film Festival. From audience members a...

Nanny McPhee is an excellent movie… if you're a seven-year old girl. That's less a negative evaluation than it is a statement of fact. This isn't a "family film;" it's a "children's film." What's more, it's for girls who are old enough to unde...

Guilty pleasure (n): a film that a critic shamefacedly admits to liking even though the prevailing opinion, as put forth by serious members of the profession, is that the movie is a piece of crap. Christmas Vacation is considered by many film ...

Strictly speaking, Never Back Down is not a remake, but it might as well be. The premise is familiar: underdog achieves self respect through training with a master then puts it all together for the big fight. Like a pop song suffering from overpl...

Spoiler Alert: To the extent that the term "spoiler" can be applied to something this formulaic, I suppose I ought to warn readers that I talk in general terms about how the movie ends. What do you get when you mix A Christmas Carol with a subst...

Dread – it’s the lifeblood of any good horror movie/ghost story. Blood, gore, and a high body count are all nice accompaniments, but for a film in the genre to work, it has to fill the viewer with an almost suffocating sense of doom. When ...

When I was a child, one of the reasons I enjoyed the Christmas season so much was the annual arrival of those endlessly-repeated television specials: Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Santa Claus is Coming to Town, The Year Without a Santa Claus. ...

It's always a tricky proposition to make a motion picture based on recent history -- and the more public the episode, the more difficult it is for the film maker to balance drama with accuracy. This is especially true when that film maker is Olive...

Non-Stop plays like what might happen if Michael Bay directed a screenplay developed for Alfred Hitchcock. The movie, while so utterly preposterous as to provoke guffaws, is presented in such a way that there's a building sense of tension. As a res...

In the tradition of Norma Rae and Silkwood, North Country is the story of one woman's struggle against an inflexible corporation. Despite some third-act flaws that weaken the conclusion, North Country does what it sets out to do: inspire and uplif...