ReelViews for PG-13 movies

The Holiday is no vacation. Sloppy writing, an overindulgent editor, and poor casting have taken an intriguing premise and transformed it into an uneven mess. The movie follows the lives of two women at Christmastime who trade houses. One story,...

Home Again, Hallie Meyers-Shyer’s contribution to the dying romantic comedy genre, isn’t likely to cause an instant revival. Artificial and reeking of white privilege, this is the kind of movie that causes regular folks to shake their head...

It’s probably fair to say that Liam Neeson could do this role in his sleep. Perhaps that would explain the curious lack of energy not only in his performance but in the production as a whole. Ever since Neeson became accepted as an action st...

John Sayles is one of the last true independent American filmmakers. Honeydripper is his 16th feature and he has made all of them on his own terms without studio interference. (He sells them to distributors once they are in the can.) To date, his...

The wonderful thing about dreams, like hope, is that everyone can nurture their own, and there's no cost. It's taking the next step -- transforming those wispy ideals and half-realized wishes into reality -- that demands a price, and sometimes a ...

Hope Springs has the unusual distinction of providing a sample of what an Ingmar Bergman movie might be like if made for mass American consumption. The production leavens the painful psychological introspection that defined the Swedish director's b...

Low, gray clouds scud across the sky while the grass of a seemingly-endless plain ripples in response to the prompting of a spring breeze. Thunder rumbles in the distance. On another day, a bright sun gazes down on those same fields while cattl...

Sometimes with a movie like The Host, it's tough to determine whether the fatal flaws lie in the source material or the adaptation. Considering that the author of the source material is Stephenie Meyer, who singlehandedly defanged vampires and decl...

One of the most depressing movie-going experiences I can think of is to sit through about 90 minutes of a so-called "comedy" and not laugh once. Unfortunately, that is becoming an all-too-common occurrence. Rob Schneider's The Hot Chick is the mo...

It's surprising that Warner Brothers has elected to release such a bad movie in the midst of the hottest box office season - flotsam of this nature is normally unceremoniously dumped in February or September. There's hardly an area in which H...