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It's not a stretch to say that I am not a member of Aquamarine's target demographic. It's a good bet that about 90% of the film's viewers will be girls between the ages of 8 and 14. I'm sure the movie works better for them than it did for me. St...

Art of Love, which started life with the title Simone, starts out as something different from how it finishes. It’s a tale of two halves. The first 45 minutes represent a whimsical journey of love as a shy young woman plays a cat-and-mouse g...

What is it about fantasy novels that makes them so difficult to translate effectively to the silver screen? It’s not impossible – J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series and Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings adaptations are proof that i...

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...

One of the longest films of the fall (both in terms of title length and running length) is The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. It seems every bit as long or longer than its 160 minutes. Parts of the movie are brilliant in a ...

Joe Wright's interpretation of Ian McEwan's Atonement proves that, when it comes to literary adaptations, he understands what he's doing. Wright’s previous feature was Pride and Prejudice, a significantly happier production than this one (althoug...

Babylon A.D. has the look and feel of a skeleton: an unfinished outline that whooshes by so fast that it becomes incomprehensible as its storyline and characters are lost in a flurry of fast cuts and poorly choreographed action sequences. The film...

The Ballad of Narayama, a 1958 Japanese film from director Keisuke Kinoshita, is revered in some critical circles because of its extreme stylization – using the art of kabuki theater to form a template for the exploration of Shichiro Fukazaw...

Be Cool, the belated sequel to 1995's Get Shorty, has moments when we think it's going to work. It occasionally tantalizes with witty dialogue and sharp supporting performances. Alas, those are only teases - the film is priming us for something t...

Let me start with a disclosure: I have not read the Alex Garland novel upon which The Beach is based, so I'm not in a position to discuss firsthand whether or not it butchers its source text (according to some reports, it does). The film represen...