Movies with screenplay written by Julian Fellowes

Despite being blessed with well-designed period sets and top-tier acting, this collaboration between Downton Abbey writer Julian Fellowes and director Michael Engler fails to take flight. I’m not one who normally issues demerits for a slow p...

If you don’t know who the Earl of Grantham is, you can probably stop here. If you don’t know Lady Mary’s tragic history, this movie may not be for you. And if you aren’t breathlessly awaiting the next cutting quip from Lady Violet, the...

The term “fan service” is often used in association with popular genre projects: Marvel films, Star Trek, Star Wars, and the like. The two Downton Abbey films (the first, released in 2019, and its sequel, A New Era) illustrate that even Ma...

Pompeii is a big, glorious, cheesy mess. A fusion of Gladiator and Dante’s Peak, it can’t decide whether it wants to be an action film about coliseum combatants or a disaster flick. Predictably, by trying to be both, it ends up being good as ne...

A staple of high school literature classes, Romeo & Juliet has proven no less popular with filmmakers, who return to this classic on a regular basis. The problem with making a new version of Shakespeare's most read romance is that, like Hamlet, the...

Given the screenplay for The Tourist, Alfred Hitchcock would have hired Cary Grant (or Jimmy Stewart) and Grace Kelly. Then he would have applied his particular brand of magic - the one that allowed him to sell the improbable - and an engaging rom...

The Young Victoria, which was selected as the closing film of the 2009 Toronto Film Festival (a position that often attracts mediocrity), isn't so much poorly made as it is uninspired. It's hard to determine whether the root cause is that the earl...