reviews

It’s a familiar movie trope: the Mother From Hell. But Brenda Blethyn makes her an unmissable combination of love and angst and fear and warmth.

Bittersweet and deeply, achingly romantic, this perfect, perfect film — based on Susan Minot’s novel — enfolds regrets and memories and love and hope in the snug embrace of a story of how one moment can send us careening down a path we never expected.

Can a film be poised and belligerent at the same time?

I was so tempted to walk out of *License to Wed.* And I have *never* walked out of a movie, not in my ten-year career as a film critic, not before.

I never thought I’d ever say such a thing, but we must admire Bay for being resolute in his inconsequence. *Transformers* works only because it is gloriously, emphatically meaningless and cheerfully, genially brainless. It’s like a big dumb dog — you just can’t hate it.

Hoorah! John McClane is back! Yippee-kai-ay! Right? Eh, not so much.

I wasn’t just bored by *Evan Almighty,* I was actively disgusted that so much money was spent on a film that is so poorly written, and so inconsistent and incoherent that it makes about as much sense as the six-thousand-year-old book written by ignorant goat herders that inspired it.