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Tag Search Results For 'based on a book' (29)
21
The Movie Mom | July 22nd 2008 by Nell Minow
The real-life story of a group of MIT math whiz kids who won millions playing blackjack gets the glossy Hollywood treatment here -- a poor but worthy son of a single mother who needs money for med school tuition makes... read more
Journey to the Center of the Earth
The Movie Mom | July 10th 2008 by Nell Minow
The most impressive achievement from Brendan Fraser and Josh Hutcherson in this 3D action -adventure is holding our attention as it feels like we are being chased by a drooling dinosaur and squirted with something really ooky. Fraser plays a... read more
Kit Kittredge: An American Girl
The Movie Mom | July 1st 2008 by Nell Minow
"Kit Kittredge" is remarkable for what it is and just as remarkable for what it is not. It is wholesome but it is not sugary. It is family-friendly but it does not gloss over economic realities and family stress.... read more
The Sword in the Stone
The Movie Mom | June 23rd 2008 by Nell Minow
Based on the book by T.H. White, this is the story of the early years of King Arthur. Nicknamed "Wart," the future King Arthur is squire to a knight when he meets Merlin the magician, who promises to take on... read more
The Spiderwick Chronicles
The Movie Mom | June 23rd 2008 by Nell Minow
The best-selling series of books about children who find their mysterious old house surrounded by magical creatures has been turned into a visually sumptuous treat for fans of fantasy and imagination. Freddie Highmore (Charlie and the Chocolate Facto read more
The Incredible Hulk
The Movie Mom | June 12th 2008 by Nell Minow
It begins with a zippy credit sequence that dispatches with the backstory Ang Lee's lumbering 2003 version took more than an hour to slog through. And we're off! Who cares what kind of gamma rays turned David Banner into the... read more
The Other Boleyn Girl
The Movie Mom | June 9th 2008 by Nell Minow
Take away the sumptuous settings and Hollywood glamour and what you have here is like Henry VIII for Dummies enacted by the cast of the OC. Natalie Portman plays Anne Boleyn, who became the second of Henry VIII's six wives... read more
The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian
The Movie Mom | May 15th 2008 by Nell Minow
The Pevensie children are back in London and contemporary life seems pale and uninvolving compared to their adventures in the magical land of Narnia. As they wait for the Tube, a wall opens up and just as happened when they... read more
Fugitive Pieces
The Movie Mom | May 15th 2008 by Nell Minow
In this impressionistic, rose-and honey-toned memory piece, young Jacob hides from the Nazis in 1941 Poland but his parents are killed and his sister is captured. The terrified boy is discovered by a Greek archaeologist, who takes him in and... read more
P.S. I Love You
The Movie Mom | May 7th 2008 by Nell Minow
Hillary Swank does not have the chin for romance or the rhythm for comedy. Her two Oscars were for earnest, androgynous roles (“Boys Don’t Cry” and “Million Dollar Baby”) that made the most of her strong jaw and lanky... read more
Iron Man
The Movie Mom | May 1st 2008 by Nell Minow
With its first self-financed production, Marvel has produced one of the best superhero movies ever made, pure popcorn pleasure for its special effects, its story, its villain, and its hero. Director Jon Favreau, star Robert Downey Jr. and a first-cla read more
No Country for Old Men (2007)
Celluloid Heroes | March 26th 2008 by Paul McElligott
I’m fixin’ to do something dumber than hell, but I’m going anyways. Ten years ago, movies like this didn’t win Best Picture. They lost to safe, happy movies like Forrest Gump and Shakespeare in Love. By their usual standards, the Academy read more
The Last Emperor (1987)
Celluloid Heroes | March 9th 2008 by Paul McElligott
All your life you thought you were better than everyone else. Now you think you’re the worst of all! Perhaps the saddest line in Bernardo Bertolucci’s Oscar-sweeping epic, comes early when the 9-year-old Emperor Pu Yi (Tijger Tsou) naively t read more
Beowulf (2007)
Celluloid Heroes | March 5th 2008 by Paul McElligott
If we die, it will be not be for gold, but for glory. The high-tech motion capture technique that director Robert Zemeckis uses here has improved considerably since 2004’s The Polar Express, but not enough to recommend that he use it again. True, read more
3:10 to Yuma (2007)
Celluloid Heroes | February 6th 2008 by Paul McElligott
You’re conscience is sensitive, Dan. I don’t think it’s my favorite part of you. Unlike the South, the western does seem to rise again. And again and again and again. The genre has been pronounced dead more often than Generalissimo Francisco F read more
Stardust (2007)
Celluloid Heroes | January 22nd 2008 by Paul McElligott
You’ll understand when you meet her, provided we don’t get murdered by pirates first. This movie wants to be The Princess Bride so bad it almost makes me feel like a heel to break the news. Almost. Unfortunately, this desperately earnest fantas read more
The Bourne Ultimatum (2007)
Celluloid Heroes | January 15th 2008 by Paul McElligott
You start down this path, where does it end? It was probably inevitable, but a faint hint of repetition has crept into the Jason Bourne franchise. This third movie feels and awful lot like the second, but that’s not entirely a bad thing. There is read more
The Bourne Supremacy (2004)
Celluloid Heroes | December 17th 2007 by Paul McElligott
It’s not a mistake. They don’t make mistakes. They don’t do random. Given his initials, it’s probably not a stretch to think that Robert Ludlum was inviting comparisons between his character Jason Bourne and Ian Fleming’s James read more
Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970)
Celluloid Heroes | December 1st 2007 by Paul McElligott
I fear all we have done is awaken a sleeping giant fill him with a terrible resolve. Think of this movie like a long, slightly boring lecture in history class, only with explosions. This attempt to do for the attack on Pearl Harbor what The Longest read more
From Here to Eternity (1953)
Celluloid Heroes | December 1st 2007 by Paul McElligott
Nobody ever lies about being lonely. In lesser hands, this movie would have been one long soap opera, but this adaptation of James Jones’ rather bawdy novel manages to wring real human drama out of its characters instead. The real miracle is that read more
Flight of the Phoenix (2004)
Celluloid Heroes | November 24th 2007 by Paul McElligott
The design is perfect. The only flaw is that we have to rely on you to fly it. I didn’t think it was possible to do a bad imitation of Michael Bay without making it a deliberate parody, but this remake of the 1965 Jimmy Stewart classic manages to read more
The Flight of the Phoenix (1965)
Celluloid Heroes | November 24th 2007 by Paul McElligott
That is precisely the reaction I would have expected from a man of your obvious limitations. Back when I was a kid, this movie used to play on the Saturday afternoon movie about every third week and, being a boy with a jones for all things aviation, read more
Die Hard (1988)
Celluloid Heroes | November 20th 2007 by Paul McElligott
Man, if this is their idea of Christmas, I gotta be here for New Year’s. When 1988 began, this guy Bruce Willis was a popular enough TV star, known for his years on Moonlighting, but his two ventures into film were a pair of alleged comedies that read more
A Mighty Heart (2007)
Celluloid Heroes | November 13th 2007 by Paul McElligott
I am not terrorized. You can’t be terrorized. Despite its Hallmark Hall of Fame title, A Mighty Heart is a spare, unblinking look at the last days of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl through eyes of his wife, Mariane, and those who desper read more
The Iron Giant (1999)
Celluloid Heroes | November 8th 2007 by Paul McElligott
I am now the luckiest kid in America! This must be the biggest discovery since, I don’t know, television or something! Before he struck it big with Disney, Pixar and The Incredibles, director Brad Bird helmed this minor delight of a movie for Warn read more
A Good Year (2006)
Celluloid Heroes | November 8th 2007 by Paul McElligott
You’ll come to see that a man learns nothing from winning. The act of losing, however, can elicit great wisdom. Not least of which is how much more enjoyable it is to win. Suffice it to say I am not a regular consumer of romantic comedies. Most of read more
Paths of Glory (1957)
Celluloid Heroes | November 4th 2007 by Paul McElligott
There are few things more fundamentally encouraging and stimulating than seeing someone else die. Legendary French director François Truffaut famously said that it was impossible to make a truly anti-war film, because film inherently glamorizes eve read more
The Blue Max (1966)
Celluloid Heroes | November 4th 2007 by Paul McElligott
This is 1918. Things have changed. The dazzling flying sequences in this movie are worth the price of admission all by themselves. This is a good thing because the story is nothing to write home about. Much like its contemporaries, Grand Prix and Th read more
1408 (2007)
Celluloid Heroes | October 30th 2007 by Paul McElligott
Eight dollars for beer nuts? This room is evil. 1408 seems to prove the existing axiom that, when adapting Stephen King to the screen, restraint trumps excess almost every time. The best adaptations of the author’s work, The Dead Zone, Stand By Me read more
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