The official title of Baz Luhrmann’s new film is not Gatsby! or The Great Gatsby 3D or even Baz Luhrmann Presents The Great Gatsby, but it could very well be any one of these things.

The best film adaptations of novels help us see and experience the book in a new way. Luhrmann’s gorgeous, gaudy, overstuffed Gatsby merely answers one question: What would The Great Gatsby look like as a Baz Luhrmann film?

Well, it would look a whole lot like his Moulin Rouge, mixed with a generous dose of his Romeo + Juliet (Leo is even in it!) and a dab of his Strictly Ballroom.

So the question remains: Is Luhrmann’s gonzo, over-saturated cinematic world actually a good fit for Gatsby? Yes and no. Like Jay Gatsby, Luhrmann sure knows how to throw a party. And the parties here are decadent, eye-popping affairs—with champagne flowing and roaming acrobats and giddy flappers mixing in with the society swells (all in 3D! It’s like you are there!). It’s the rest of the film that falls a little flat. All of this carefully orchestrated stimulation can be a bit stultifying—the film doesn't give us any room to breathe. (And the hip-hop infused soundtrack...

Another solid offering from this year's Maryland Film Festival.

When she was 17 years old, Freda Kelly took a job as a secretary—and that job made her the most envied girl on the planet.

You see, her bosses went by the names John, Paul, George, and Ringo (“Richie” to her). Okay, technically, she worked for Beatles manager Brian Epstein (“Eppie”), but she hung out with the lads all the time—her crushes rotating based on who was nice to her on a given day.

Good Ol’ Freda tells the story of this smart, sensible, capable girl from Liverpool—a Beatles fan, but not an overly breathless one—who got a front-row seat to Beatlemania. A dedicated, protective employee,  she ran the Beatles fan club—which included writing their newsletter and handling their sacks and sacks of mail (featuring all sorts of arcane requests for locks of hair and pillowcases that Ringo slept on)—like a tight ship.

Good Ol’ Freda also gives us a somewhat priceless glimpse at the Beatles when they were first starting out—just a bunch of fun-loving, wide-eyed blokes from Liverpool, prone to clowning around Freda’s desk, with no idea of what was...

Here's another impressive one from this year's Maryland Film Festival. 

Before there was nerd chic, there were just plain old nerds, and they were notorious for engaging in elaborate role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons in their parents’ basements. In recent years, the Dungeons and Dragons crowd has been overtaken by the computer gaming industry, but in this funny and dark and a little sad (but mostly funny!) film, we meet the 20-something Scott, who still plays his own “RPG” with his adult buddies in his grandma’s den. But, of course, they’re not really adults at all—instead, arrested adolescents who retreat to this imaginary world because the real one hasn’t treated them too kindly. Scott is the group’s leader. He’s the one who  has created the game, and also the one who makes the rules, does the voices of the various kings and damsels and dwarves—creating his own little captive theater in the round. Scott’s happiness and self-esteem is completely wrapped up in this isolated fifedom, where he isn’t an underemployed, virginal loser, but a gamemaster—a geek god.

All of this changes when two monumental events occur in Scott’s life. He recruits...

I'm tempted to call Michael Bay’s Pain & Gain a clever film for dumb people. It operates under the guiding principle that if you put ironic air quotes around everything, you are immune from all criticism. The characters can be vile, the violence gratuitous, the film can be casually misogynistic and anti-Semitic, but hey, that’s okay because it’s all just a joke, people. Lighten up.

The film begins to insulate itself right out the gate by saying, “This is based on a true story . . . unfortunately.” (I laughed.)

It’s Miami in the 1980s. Our “hero” is Daniel Lugo (Mark Wahlberg), a body builder and personal trainer who believes that his own physical perfection is merely his first step toward the American dream. One of his clients is a self-made millionaire named Victor Kershaw (Tony Shalhoub), a greedy and grasping little man with a giant Star of David dangling from his hairy chest (for reals). Lugo gets the idea to kidnap Kershaw and get him to sign away his fortune. He recruits two body building cohorts: Paul Doyle (Dwayne Johnson), a former cokehead just out of prison, now a guileless born-again Christian; and Adrian Doorbal (Anthony Mackie), a gym rat who’s been made impotent...