
Wonder Woman movie review: women’s work
Everything about this joyful, sincere origin story feels like a retort — a very welcome and much needed one — to traditional male-centered superhero stories.

Everything about this joyful, sincere origin story feels like a retort — a very welcome and much needed one — to traditional male-centered superhero stories.

Girls and women love movies just as much as boys and men do. But it’s a love that gets thrown back in our faces by 95 percent of films.
Hints at a new mythology of darkness and light, of scary childhood and even scarier adolescence…
The cleanest, neatest discount store you’ve ever seen appears in Mark Romanek’s *One Hour Photo,* a clean, neat, all-corners-squared psychological thriller whose quiet precision is the most unnerving thing about it.
I’ve seen Gladiator half a dozen times now — thrice on a big screen and thrice on DVD — and it gets me deeper in the gut every time: By the time Maximus whispers his final words, assuring Lucilla that “Lucius is safe,” I’m starting to sniffle. By the time Juba is reverently burying Maximus’s totems of his wife and son, I’m bawling.
Is Gladiator an action movie? Is it an historical drama? Is it a sweeping epic? Yes. Like The 13th Warrior, this is a thinking person’s action movie. Like Braveheart, this is a story of a brutal era told with stunning realism. Like Terminator 2, this is a violent movie that indicts our appetite for violence. Like The Matrix, this thrills on both a visceral and cerebral level.
So how else can I react to Mission to Mars but with enthusiasm? Here is a mostly scientifically accurate movie about the planet that actually looks as if it were filmed there. No, it’s not a perfect film — but as one of the like-minded friends with whom I saw Mission to Mars pointed out, we’re so hungry for real science fiction on film that we can forgive its flaws.