1. A boy and his rose: reading this is the sweetest Valentine you can give yourself ( Read more... )

It is impossible to live in our society and be unfamiliar with the story of Dickens' A Christmas Carol. Scrooge has been played by Reginald Owen, Alastair Sim, George C. Scott, Patrick Stewart, Mr. Magoo, and Bill Murray, among countless others. It is an unwritten rule that every television show ever made must have a "Christmas Carol" episode. I ( Read more... )

The Girl in a Swing by Richard Adams--If you've read Watership Down, you might expect this novel ( Read more... )

Tim Burton's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory will be most successful with members of the audience who have not known and loved the 1971 version starring Gene Wilder for most of their lives. Burton offers a winningly grotesque adaptation of Roald Dahl's book, filled with visual oomph and dark humor, but he's fighting a losing battle with people ( Read more... )

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind stars Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet and another genius script from Charlie Kaufman, brilliantly directed by Michel Gondry. The plot involves Carrey and Winslet breaking off their relationship and utilizing the services of a surrealistic agency which erases all memories of the former loved one from the client's ( Read more... )

The Butterfly Effect features Ashton Kutcher as a young man who discovers that he can mentally travel back to certain events in his life and alter his behavior, thus changing his present-day circumstances. The first part of the movie is heavy going as it's all just about his grim, horrible life as it originally happened, and some of it is quite ( Read more... )

Calendar Girls is a 2003 movie from the U.K. based on the real-life story of the middle-aged members of a Yorkshire Women's Institute who published a calendar featuring nude pictures of themselves to benefit a local hospital. Helen Mirren and Julie Walters are both funny and touching as the main instigators of the plan, but all of the ladies are ( Read more... )

50 First Dates features Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore, trying to recapture the romantic cuteness of The Wedding Singer. This time out Sandler plays a marine veterinarian in Hawaii who specializes in one night stands with tourists, and Barrymore plays a woman with short-term memory loss, like the guy in Memento. Every day she wakes up thinking it' ( Read more... )

Catch That Kid is a truly horrible children's movie about three eighth graders robbing a bank because the little girl's father suddenly falls down and needs an experimental operation in Denmark which will cost $250,000. Both boys have a crush on the girl and she strings them along to get them to help her in a way that is supposed to be cute but ( Read more... )

Miracle tells the story of the U.S. ice hockey team who won the 1980 Olympic gold medal in a huge upset. Kurt Russell, wearing the ugliest possible haircut and a stunning array of plaid pants, plays Herb Brooks, the dour Minnesota coach who hand-picked the team and bullied and coerced them to victory. Hockey fans will like all the training and game ( Read more... )