Cinderella (2021) movie review: from the ashes…
Fairy tale goes jukebox musical with a feminist, gender-fluid spin. Throws irony and sarcasm at heterosexuality, patriarchy, even monarchy. Pretty darn fun, with a sweetly spunky Ella in Cabello.
Moulin Rouge
Pan movie review: a disaster of fantastically epic proportions
An embarrassingly empty pastiche of numerous beloved action blockbusters, all frenetic action and soulless mishmashes of fantasy imagery.
Burlesque (review)
Oh, cheese, glorious cheese! Christina Aguilera gets off a bus from Iowa in Los Angeles with nothing but a coupla bucks in her pocket and aspirations of stardom. As a dancer. Or maybe a singer. But something flashy, anyway: it’s L.A., after all!
February 19: DVD alternatives to this weekend’s multiplex offerings
We know how it is: You’d like to go to the movies this weekend, but they won’t let you of the special hospital without a good reason. But you can have a multiplex-like experience right in your room with a collection of the right DVDs. And when someone asks you on Monday, “Hey, did you … more…
Paris 36 (review)
Oh my goodness, I didn’t expect this: *Paris 36* is *The Muppet Show* in, you know, Paris in 1936.
Happy Feet (review)
Fluffy baby penguins dancing and singing and waddling around their world with wide-eyed wonder? You have to have a heart of stone not to be a puddle of goo after coming in contact with that.
Chicago (review)
Their *Chicago* — based on the stage musical by John Kander, Fred Ebb and Bob Fosse — is utterly singable, danceable, cheerable, with musical numbers that straddle the unwillingness of today’s movie audiences to suspend our disbelief about movie characters breaking into song unless they’re Disney lions or talking candelabra.
It’s a Very Merry Muppet Christmas Movie (review)
Snarky and sweet at the same time and loaded with cameos of celebs having a great time, it’s even set in the old Muppet Theater, like the show was, with the star on the door of Miss Piggy’s dressing room and Statler and Waldorf heckling from the balcony and everything. I felt 8 years old again.
top 11 movies of 2001: the great, the good, and the really, really ugly
Another year of really, really crappy movies was saved, in the end, by a Bohemian storm, a magical ring, a robot boy, and a lonely mademoiselle. A feeling of the otherworldly permeates every movie on my best-of list this year, even the one documentary. And the weird thing is that most of these films were … more…
The Others movie review: scary movie
This is classy gothic horror, old-fashioned in the best way: there are no CGI specters, just mysterious footsteps and distant cries and movement in the shadows and hushed whispers and slamming doors.
