You may not know it (I didn’t, but my companion/father did) but this is a remake of the insanely adored 1953 French film Mr. Hulot’s Holiday. Full disclosure: we missed the first couple of minutes with our hubristic surety that the theatre would be empty. It was packed! A rated-G movie, […]

Jack Finney’s 1956 Collier’s magazine serial Invasion of The Bodysnatchers is as vital an original work as George Romero’s first zombie movie in 1968. It’s imminently adaptable and re-adaptable, tweaking it ever so slightly for a whole new metameaning depending on society’s anxieties of the day. In 1956, the story couched its thinly […]

I love love love the Broadway soundtrack to Hairspray.  So much, in fact, that I went without dinner and still bounced a check in order to own it, it’s so infectious and cheerful and fun.  Marc Shaiman’s music (South Park: Bigger Longer & Uncut, Down With Love) can capture a feeling in a bottle like […]

When I saw they were making another Transformers movie, I responded in pretty much the same way I did to the news of a live action Garfield movie: Oh yuck, who cares, and I’m certainly not going to see it.  As momentum (and nerdly peer pressure) built, I realized I couldn’t escape.  I wasn’t expecting […]

The 1976 Omen scared the padiddle out of me. My best friend Portia and I would hole up in my room to watch it, and we were very young, maybe under 10, and scare ourselves silly with these movies. Maybe it was our age and our mutual propensity to wind each other up, […]

If you have any more expectations than a big, whiz-bang spectacle out of this movie, then you will be sorely disappointed. If you are willing and eager to see spectacular set pieces and acts of derring-do, without all that character junk muddying the waters, then come, come to Poseidon on the big screen. […]

Susan Strohman brought this musical stage adaptation of the 1968 Mel Brooks film to Broadway in 2001 and the entire universe simply had to have it. Now Strohman brings exactly that show (but with a few more locations) to the big screen. It’s like the fanciest A&E/BBC presentation of a stage hit […]

The plot of this movie is timely all over again after the years between its 1977 original satire and today, thanks to the colossal collapse of Enron, WorldCom, and their ilk. It has a particular resonance to those of us who did OK during those growth years, but always hoped we would turn that […]

I was on pins and needles waiting for this movie. The preview made me misty and wriggly with anticipation all at once. Knowing director Peter Jackson’s intense adoration of this film, and having witnessed many examples of his dedication to art on film, I had supreme confidence that this King Kong was going […]

I was so revolted by the heinous Hollywood marketing of Jane Austen’s classic (“Sometimes the last person on earth you want to be with is the one person you can’t be without” - I mean come on!) that I was tempted to skip it. The previews made Keira Knightly look as if she were […]