ReelViews for PG-13 movies

For a filmmaker like Joss Whedon, known world-wide for playing with huge budgets in genre entertainment, the choice to bring to the screen one of Shakespeare's most popular comedies using a low-budget, "experimental" style might seem an odd choice....

The ghost of Mark Twain looms large over Jeff Nichols' Mud, a modern-day homage to the settings and characters popularized in some of Twain's best loved works. The protagonists in Mud, a couple of 14-year olds, are named Ellis (Tye Sheridan) and Ne...

If compared to the recent batch of high-profile live action remakes of animated classics, Mulan is a unique case. When it comes to baggage, it has the lightest load. Beauty & the Beast, Aladdin, and The Lion King all made more than $200M during...

The 1999 remake of the horror classic The Mummy surprised Universal Pictures with its box office success. The studio had expected it to be profitable, but not that profitable. However, long before the worldwide gross crept close to $400 million,...

The Mummy is pretty silly stuff. But that's okay when you consider that, beneath all the action/adventure and horror trappings, it's actually a comedy. Think of a big-budget, high profile effort in the vein of Sam Raimi's Army of Darkness wit...

When Universal Pictures remade The Mummy in 1999, they wisely opted for a radically different tone, shifting from the atmospheric horror of the 1932 original to a Raiders of the Lost Ark-style adventure motif. Now, for the third major film to b...

It has been a bad year for Indiana Jones and his knock-offs. In the wake of the lackluster Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, we now have the second sequel to The Mummy, called Tomb of the Dragon Emperor. It is easily the worst o...

Like most Agatha Christie stories, Murder on the Orient Express is all about the “whodunnit?” Once that question has been answered, there’s little reason to revisit the story. Christie never cared much about character development and her ...

One would be justified in approaching Music and Lyrics with a certain amount of skepticism, considering that its writer/director, Marc Lawrence, is perhaps known for foisting two Miss Congenialitys upon the world (although to be fair, he didn't dir...

Must Love Dogs is a product - a pre-packaged, easily-digestible motion picture designed with one particular audience in mind. You know the kind of film. You have seen it before, usually with names like Nancy Myers or Nora & Delia Ephron involved....