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I am not a huge horror fan but I like them when their heavy on humor and light on blood. This one fills the bill. It has a lot of teen stars who must've loved getting to do a real screamer. And it also has a clever going back in time aspect to the plot so as Killer 2 and 3 come out--and they certainly will--the actors can keep coming back. Kiernan Shipka is the main lead and she manages to be cute and adorable no matter who gets killed. That's not a criticism. She has some great lines. Its definitely worth watching. Everyone is good. Near the end the plot gets a little confusing but it all ends well. Time travel and horror are hard to keep straight but really it's well worth watching. It's a fun ride.

I am someone who has never seen Twilight and a huge number of the reviewers seem to hate Taylor Lautner, one of the stars of Twilight, and the star of Abduction. Since I had no clue who he was, I just enjoyed the movie. It's the kind of movie I really like. Someone who suddenly finds himself the prey of various nefarious organizations and has to both survive and find out why he is being hunted. As his companion, he has Lily Collins to survive with. The movie sets up a little slow but once the chase begins it's fast paced action to the end. It's a teen version of North by Northwest or whatever similar chase movie you want to name. OK. It's NOT as good as North by Northwest but it is fun and well worth watching. Do NOT believe the Lautner haters. He's good. Lily Collins is good. The direction is very good. Fun all the way through.

This movie starts out with a teen movie beginning you might have seen before, although the star, angourie rice, with the incredibly hard to spell first name and ridiculously easy to spell last name, definitely keeps your attention. And then the plot gradually starts to twist and keeps on twisting and you realize you are not watching your typical teen movie. The actors are really good. Yeah, the movie has a few flaws. Some of the character changes come about a little too quickly but if you like teen movies, this one is definitely a gem and angourie rice, another australian actress with a perfect american accent is certainly fun to watch. Maybe in Australia Angourie is a common name.

There is a singing scene between Rex, the rock star, and laura Marano. It is freakishly close to a singing scene in Austin and Ally between Laura marano and Austin--Ros Lynch. Both songs are pretty and there's even a similar "lean on" lyric. And in both Laura Marano plays a singer with stage fright. The scene has very little to do with the actual plot. It's just amazingly close to Austin and Ally. Laura Marano must have had a strong deja vu. Meanwhile I had no idea Rex was Avan Jogia (Beck) from Victorious. He did a good job. I like when actors appear as characters and you don't recognize them at all. The movie is good fun and if you're an Austin and Ally fan you will love the singing scene.

What do you need for a good Hallmark-Style Rom-Com. You need a male lead and a female lead that are engaging and have some chemistry. Check. You need a plot that, even if it follows a predictable pattern, has a few quirks and twists that make it interesting. Check. You need a fun background for the action to take place. Check. You need good dialogue with a little wit. Check. Most Rom-Coms in one way or another follow a Jane Austen book. This movie is no exception. We've got Pride and Prejudice here with an arrogant billionaire learning some life-lessons and falling in love with a spunky female who's not afraid to stand up to him. It's really nicely done from the beginning to the concluding kiss you know is coming but it's not about the kiss, it's about the journey and this is a fun one.

Wow. The first shot of Kim Novak says it all. No plastic surgery. No botox. No nudity. Just great beauty, charisma, and sex appeal. Like Lana Turner in the Postman Always Rings Twice. OK. There's great lighting and great photography but Kim Novak is one of the last of the great Hollywood film stars. When the word star meant something. The movie is a nice noir, too. Fred MacMurray does his best Double Indemnity acting. But I like him better in comedies. Still, the movie works. Richard Quine is the director and he does a good job. The movie really is above average for a 50's noir. A lot of touches to reveal the sleazy side of life.

Storm in a Teacup was made in 1937. Nazi Germany was on the rise and this is a brilliant satire of dictators and Nazism. Although it takes place in a Scottish village, it is adapted from a German play by Bruno Frank, a German Jewish writer who knew what was going on and fled Germany for other parts of Europe and eventually managed to flee to the United States. Otherwise he would most certainly have been killed, not only for being Jewish but for his play, later turned into this movie. What is amazing about this piece is that it so brilliantly captures all the terrors of a brutal dictatorship while maintaining it's disguise as a sweet, little comedy. It succeeds on all levels, aided by a great cast with Rex Harrison, Vivien Leigh and. Cecil Parker as the Provost/Dictator. It enjoys good company with other similar gems--To Be or Not To Be and Me and the Colonel.

I don't know if any credit is given--I have not seen this movie--but the plot as described is taken almost plot turn for plot turn from a Roald Dahl short story called SKIN. It is a great short story. It is available for anyone to download from the Internet. I hope the script writer has given credit to Roald Dahl because it is DEFINITELY ROALD DAHL's PLOT. I have not described in great detail the plot of Roald Dahl's story--anyone who wants to can read it--but the plot summary of this movie is the plot of SKIN.

How We Met is a fun low budget movie. Most of the movie is a flashback and it has one of the plots where something simple like a blind date spins wildly out of control. I found the twists and turns and complications amusing. And I enjoy when filmmakers and actors can put together an entertaining movie on a low budget. Naturally, there is some rawness to it due to the low budget but if you can overlook that and just enjoy the movie for what it is--a cleverly written action romantic comedy spoof--you will enjoy it.

A gazillion stupid books and movies have this thing where one of their teen characters says, "Oh, I can't go to Harvard. It costs too much." Please a little fact checking. A little reality. HARVARD IS TUITION BLIND and has been for years. What does tuition blind mean. It means that anyone who is accepted to Harvard is guaranteed a scholarship, if they need it. GUARANTEED. Anyone, no matter how poor, if they're smart enough can go to Harvard. Princeton is the same. So, apply away.

This movie was originally a stage play and it shows. The writing is excellent and the sets are few and it is all about the interpersonal relationships that unfold as the movie unfolds. The direction is excellent. Simple and sparse. Asquith let's the words and the actors do their thing and they do it very well. One of the gems hidden in Amazon Prime. To hide it further, the movie even has two names. Either Court Martial or Carrington VC. It's very British but when the British do it right, it is well worth watching. David Niven, Margaret Leighton are excellent as is everyone else.

This is a clever and funny little Indie movie. The script is really good. Ok. It's crude like a lot of comedies are these days BUT it's also written with intelligence, a rare commodity in movie making at any time. The acting is good, the script is good. It's made in Canada. Canadians always like you to know that. And all the actors are Canadian. Canadians also like you to know that. You might think they're Americans. They look like Americans. Talk like Americans but they're Canadian. Sorry to get off on this little North American tangent but really if you like a good, funny rom-com that has some actual originality to it, this is a good bet.

Romantic comedies have been around for a long time and they all have the same ending but how they get there and whether you like the characters on the journey is what makes the movie good or not. This movie really takes an original path. And the characters are indeed very enjoyable. It's really a cinematic tour de force in that it almost all takes place in one elevator going up and down in a hotel over the course of a year and it must have been made on an incredibly low budget yet the movie itself is very entertaining. The script is good, the acting is good and the directing is good. For anyone who likes romantic comedies this is definitely a film to put on your list and if you are a film student or someone who is interested in film making this is a MUST SEE because these people made a really, really good movie for very very little money. The movie is now available on Amazon prime and it is definitely worth checking out.

This is a movie based on a play by Franz Werfel who had the "priviledge" of being the writer whose books Hitler vowed to burn first. Luckily, he was able to escape Europe and come to America. As a side note--he was married to Alma Mahler Werfel--Mahler's widow who managed to marry or live with many of the greatest artists of the 20th century. But Werfel had quite a time trying to escape Hitler and his play was about this story. When the play came to Broadway it was softened and a lot of humor was added. The movie is more true to the Broadway play. And it is a WONDERFUL movie. Full of suspense, humor, innocence and evil. All the acting is wonderful. Danny Kaye does a wonderful job in the lead. It is not like any of his other movies. Black and white and beautiful. Worth whatever trouble you have in finding it.

So this is a SILLY teen comedy with lots of pretty 18 year old girls pretending to be 14 with all the silly conventions of every other teen comedy--the mean girls, the good girls, the boyfriend problems, all the same silly jokes and the same silly situations EXCEPT the main girl has CANCER. Wow, that is a lot of laughs. That really makes one want to tune in for all the laugh track hilarity. It's kind of unbelievable. HOW INSANE ARE THEY?

I had never heard about this movie but it's free on Amazon prime and if you like classic black and white movies, this one is amazing. Great cast with Joan Leslie in a serious role and louis hayward and richard basehart and a bunch of others--John Conway for one. Everyone is really good. Very well written. Very dramatic. Just a gem. I haven't said anything about the plot. I'm sure others have. Just watch it.

Angelina Ballerina is about a mouse who loves to dance. Like most kids, she has too much energy to sit still for long and she has found that dance is a fun way for her to move. It is also a way for her to have lots of different adventures with her best friend, Alice. It's definitely a show oriented toward girls and little girls do enjoy it a lot. The show is completely safe and age appropriate. There's lots of ballet class and lots of adventures outside of ballet class but wherever Angelina goes there's always lots of dancing. The TV show is loosely based on a best-selling series of picture books by the same name. Kids who enjoy the books will love the TV show and kids who love the TV show will enjoy the books. By the way, another good picture book for kids who love dance is Gwendolyn, the Graceful Pig which is also fun and charming.

I like Curb Your Enthusiasm. Larry David does a decent job of playing himself, however, in this movie where he has to play a role--even though the role is relatively close to his role in Curb Your Enthusiasm--he cannot carry it off. It reminds me of the episode in Curb Your Enthusiasm where he gets an acting job in The Producers and fails miserably. In this movie he fails even worse. Evan Rachel Wood is a good actress and does a nice job as the ingenue which must've been really hard playing across from a guy who's doing as bad an acting job as Larry David. What does it say about Woody Allen that he let Larry David actually complete the movie? It's a fiasco. It's hard to tell whether the script is witty or not since the lines are so butchered by David. But it is a typical Woody Allen plot. The only thing I found decent about this movie was watching Evan Rachel Wood. However, you can watch her in a lot better movies than this. Don't waste your time and certainly don't waste your money.

ghost town is a funny movie and has a lot of chemistry between the three main actors but throughout the entire movie I found it very annoying how similar the premise was to the movie Hearts & Souls (1993): Starring: Robert Downey Jr., Charles Grodin, Tom Sizemore. To state all the similarities between the two movies would give the plot away which I'm not going to do but it is very close. I guess, of course, there are a lot of other similar movies that fall into the same "ghost" genre: Wings of Desire, Sixth Sense, Topper, etc. but Ghost Town really gets very close to Heart and Soul, not that ghost town isn't worth watching which it is or has its own twists which it does but still....again ghost town is worth watching just because it is well done and the comedy and the romance and chemistry of the acting is quite engaging. I just wish there was a requirement in the screen credits where the writer and director, in this case the same guy, had to list everyone he ripped off in the making of this film.

I was at a multiplex and just finished watching the movie I went to see and being in the mood for a second feature i wandered into the movie next door. It turned out to be Hannah Montana: the Movie. I was very pleasantly surprised. The cinematography is fantastic. It's filmed in a beautiful location in Tennessee and many of the shots are just breathtaking. Disney put a lot of money into this production and it shows. The director is excellent. The songs are great. There's a really nice happy energy from the entire production. OK. The story is just a simple corny teen romantic comedy but musicals are not known for having great plots. There are obviously a lot of people writing comments here who just hate anything Hannah Montana but this is a movie that has a lot going for it. Anyone who likes Hannah Montana is going to love it and rightly so. Anyone who goes to the movie with any kind of a reasonable attitude is going to like it. Don't worry about the plot. Just sit back and enjoy the musical numbers, enjoy the incredible photography. This movie is going to make a lot of money because it's about happiness and it delivers happiness.

The Belle of New York is not one of Fred Astaire's best movies but it is nowhere near his worst. Everything about the movie is sweet, charming and light. Vera Ellen is one of the best dancers in Hollywood and a great partner for Fred. The color is beautiful. The sets and the costumes are fantastic, and while it is true it is not one of the strongest stories, there are some good laughs along the way. The music is charming. The dancing is excellent. And the movie just glides along, mostly due to the very plentiful musical numbers. If you want some dramatic tension, look elsewhere. This movie has none. If you like musicals, if you like good dancing, in particular if you like Vera Ellen, this movie is a must see. The quality of the DVD release is excellent.

The Unfinished Dance as stated in one other comment is a remake of an incredible black and white French film called La Morte Du Cygne which unfortunately is rarely ever shown except in museums, film schools and art houses. Hopefully, someday it will be available. Until then, there's this thing. It's not totally bad. It has some great dance sequences and some great film moments but it also has Danny Thomas in what must be one of the worst screen performances ever put on film. The little girl, Margaret O'Brien, is also hard to take but if she were the worst thing about the movie, it wouldn't be so bad. Still, the plot is so incredible, the occasional bad writing, the totally wretched acting of Thomas, the bizarre stares of Margaret O'Brien and the many unnecessary and mawkish scenes can't completely ruin the film. It's still worth watching. The best thing to do is to record it when it appears on Turner Classic Movies and when you watch it fast forward every time Danny Thomas appears or Margaret O'Brien gets on your nerves.

While ballet is an incredibly beautiful art, it usually loses a lot when put on film which is strange since both are visual media. However, Donya Feuer, the director, has really created a documentary that is as stunningly beautiful as ballet and strangely just as inexplicable. You kind of float along with the documentary enjoying it but not quite understanding where you are yet not minding it just because it's all so beautiful. The documentary at it's most basic level follows the life of a young ballerina in the Royal Swedish Ballet, Katje Bjorner, but it's really quite a lot more than that and in some ways a lot less. It's not in any way a story or some linear description of the life of a dancer. It just uses that theme as a way to make a beautiful, evocative film about one of the most beautiful and evocative art forms. It's really a documentary that anyone who has a love for the ballet should see.

Although I have known Deanna Durbin's name for a long time, I had never seen one of her movies. Then, recently I saw It Started with Eve and Lady on a Train and was amazed that there were black and white movies of this high quality that I had never seen. Today I saw It's a Date and stood and applauded for the last two minutes of the movie watching it alone. It would be impossible to describe all the brilliant touches in a few words but let's just say that in this movie Deanna Durbin plays an aspiring actress who not only vies with her actress mother (Kay Francis) for the same part but for the same man (Walter Pigeon). This kind of plot which is usually played out as an intense psycho/sexual drama is here played for laughs and is all the more delicious as the center of the sexual triangle between mother, daughter and lover is none other than Deanna Durbin, America's Sweetheart, who is barely ever shown kissing a man, but nonetheless in this movie is shown kissing a man twice her age who is in love with her mother. The movie is incredibly clever in both the screen writing and direction. Nothing is ever what it seems to be and the final incredible touch which brought me to my feet, applauding, was that in the last scene in a comedy fraught with underlying sexual tension, Deanna is shown on the stage in what was meant to be her mother's part, playing a NUN singing AVA MARIA, while her mother, now married to Deanna's former lover (Walter Pigeon), both watch adoringly from the audience. In fact, the mother is shown mouthing the words to Ava Maria which echoes the opening shot of the film which was of Deanna sitting in the audience mouthing the words to a song her actress mother was singing. Because it's a Deanna Durbin film, you can be fooled into thinking that this is a piece of B-movie fluff but the script and the direction equals anything Preston Sturges ever made and Preston Sturges made some great movies. It's a Date is a subtle, brilliant comedy of the first order.

the writing in this script is excellent, almost as good as Clueless, except for the fact that it has to keep to a predictable "Cheerleader" story line, but the dialogue between the characters is sharp, crisp and witty. The direction is also excellent, the cheer/dance numbers are great and the cast, while not matching the teen star power of the original, bring a lot of energy and commitment to their roles. this is a very, very likable teen movie. The extras on the DVD are entertaining but it would have been nice to hear from some of the actors and the gag reel as usual on most DVDs is far from funny. but they did put in a lot about the dancing which is enjoyable.