The Namesake (review)
If you’re not a basketcase of sobby, sloppy tears of sadness and joy by the end of *The Namesake,* then I don’t know what’s wrong with you.
If you’re not a basketcase of sobby, sloppy tears of sadness and joy by the end of *The Namesake,* then I don’t know what’s wrong with you.
Sweet, smart, and tender: you can’t say that about too many science-fiction movies. But this one will delight kids and adults alike with its expansive sense of wonder…
Sandler is one monotone note here: dead-eyed hollowness standing in for grief…
It takes it all so darn seriously that you can’t even lose yourself in its goofiness…
There’s not a single thing original or surprising here, except how sincerely touching ‘Pride’ ends up being anyway.
Did Ralph Nader ‘spoil’ the 2000 presidential election? How you answer that question may impact how you feel about this rehabilitory biographical documentary by filmmakers Henriette Mantel and Steve Skrovan, which seeks to take back the positive image and good name of the dedicated consumer advocate of long decades from the mud in which it has become mired in recent years. Does it succeed? Beautifully.
You know those “In a world where…” movie trailers? Well, *Premonition*’s would start out: “In a world where no one has ever seen *Groundhog Day*…”
I am not the audience for this flick. I don’t need a tortured justification that the choices I made are the “right” ones no matter how unhappy I am about them. I don’t need the release of laughing at my own suffering.

The ending can make or break a film. The Lives of Others, Oscar winner for Best Foreign Language Film, has one of the greatest final lines of dialogue that I’ve ever heard in a movie.
The first person who uses any aspect of this flick to justify the American debacle in Iraq is getting a swat across the nose with a copy of *My Pet Goat.* Which King Leonides of Sparta does not sit reading while his country is threatened and attacked.