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Never has the teen movie genre been more active than it is today. Seemingly every weekend, there's a new entry, and the solid box office performance assures that there will be many more to come. A trend with recent teen films has been to recycle ...

Admission is a serviceable, sporadically entertaining motion picture that has been aggressively developed for mainstream consumption. Infused with an almost relentless blandness, it's defined by soft comedy (a few laughs here and there), flaccid dr...

Like Frankenstein and Hamlet, Anna Karenina is a literary touchstone that filmmakers return to on a regular basis. The first filmed version of the book was a 1910 German silent which has long since been lost to the ages. It was released shortly bef...

Because I Said So is a made-to-order romantic comedy of the type "B" variety (that's the one where the heroine is torn between the socially and financially "ideal" guy and the one who really makes her happy). As I have previously written, a formul...

Girls Trip is the fusion of a raunchy vacation comedy and a female-bonding melodrama. Unfortunately, the jokes stop being funny about 30 minutes before the end credits roll and the character-based elements are never better than overly familia...

Gracie is a by-the-numbers sports drama about a young girl who defies the odds to succeed in an all-male arena. It's the kind of thing that might make for a compelling after school special, but is hardly what one expects to spend $10 for at a mult...

The House Bunny has a screenplay written with ten-year olds in mind about a subject that deserves an R-rating. The resulting hodgepodge of unfunny, sophomoric humor and PG-13 T&A, frosted by a sheen of appallingly nauseous "drama," makes for such ...

The Jane Austen Book Club is an example of how a movie can follow the general plot of a book yet fail to capture the spirit. The problem is a simple one to identify: much of the enjoyment derived from Karen Joy Fowler's novel comes from the way in...

Legally Blonde fits into the niche occupied by motion pictures like Clueless, Dick, and Romy and Michelle's High School Reunion - that is to say, films in which an airhead heroine captures our affection and overcomes her vacuous disability to trium...

The production notes trumpet The Matchmaker as "a romantic comedy for people who hate romantic comedies." This statement implies that the film has something exceptionally original or daring to offer those who are tired of screen love affairs that ...