RATING:
A few questions will perplex you as you watch The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor. Here, I will attempt to answer them.
Q: Where is Rachel Weisz?
A. She got her Oscar and got the hell out. She has been replaced by Maria Bello, who is sporting a dark wig and a British accent. Perhaps [...]

RATING:
Anyone who knows me, already knows that I am no fan of Kevin Costner. I find his whole self-styled Everyman routine tiresome and pretentious. He’s had some great movies over the years—Bull Durham remains one of my all-time favorites—but every time he gets into that preachy, Jimmy-Stewart-wannabe mode, I check out.
So Swing Vote, which [...]

RATING:
There is a great scene in The Wackness, a coming-of-age film about a teen pot dealer in New York named Luke (Josh Peck) who sells drugs to his depressed shrink Dr. Squires (Ben Kingsley) in exchange for free therapy. In it, Squires, feeling estranged from his cold wife (Famke Janssen), takes Luke to his [...]

RATING:
Judd Apatow loves to make movies about grown men who are secretly arrested adolescents. In Step Brothers, which is produced by Apatow and reunites Talladega Nights co-stars Will Ferrell and Jon C. Reilly, the concept is taken one step further: These grown men aren’t secretly adolescents, they are living as adolescents—both still dressed like [...]

RATING:
This is going to hurt you more than it hurts me: The new X-Files movie kind of stinks.
I was never a big fan of the show (I mean, I wasn’t a detractor or anything, I just never got into it), so the fact The X-Files: I Want to Believe plays like a pretty standard [...]

RATING:
Halfway through The Dark Knight, I realized that it reminded me of another film I had seen in the past year.
The Incredible Hulk?
Iron Man?
Hellboy II?
Try No Country For Old Men. Yes, director Christopher Nolan is dealing with themes as dark and resonant as those explored by the Coen Brothers in their Oscar winner. There [...]

RATING:
So you want the good news or the bad news? Okay, the good news: Mamma Mia! is a sun-kissed, spirited camp romp, with lots of fun moments and some inspired bits of musical comedy.
The bad news: At times the whole enterprise feels a little desperate.
Let’s start with La Meryl herself (aka Meryl Streep): She [...]

RATING:
My friends were all pretty stunned when I told them I was looking forward to Hellboy II: The Golden Army—I’m not usually a Hellboy kinda gal. But what many people don’t realize is Hellboy is not just a high-budget comic-book action film featuring a cigar-chomping, do-gooder demon and his band of mutant sidekicks, it’s [...]

RATING:
There was much breathless buzz about Journey to the Center of the Earth being the bestest 3-D movie ever! Indeed, the 3-D effects are pretty eye-popping: Yo-yos spring off the screen at you, dinosaurs slime on you, Brendan Fraser spits on you, etc. It’s all quite vivid. But I’m still not convinced. Generously speaking, [...]

RATING:
Is it possible that Eddie Murphy just has bad taste? I mean, the man has prodigious gifts—he’s arguably the greatest comic actor of his generation—and yet his recent films have been stinkers. Okay, there have been a few exceptions—Dreamgirls, obviously, plus Shrek and the Nutty Professor series—but the duds just keep on coming: [...]