The sweaty Western action, for openers, is not everyone's mental image of a "romance novel" — more suitable, one might think, for Spicy Western ca. 1937. (The accompanying strains of Alfred Newman's How the West Was Won awaken a thirst for something other than a spoof — not to be …

Neither an "instant classic" nor the polar opposite, but a middling addition to the holiday repertoire: computerized illustrations of the Chris Van Allsburg children's book about a little boy already too old to believe in Santa ("This is your crucial year"), snatched out of his bed on Christmas Eve for …

James Marsh’s Man on Wire — the superb Academy Award-winning documentary account of the death-defying stroll that high-wire artist Philippe Petit took between the Twin Towers back in 1974 — is given a fantasy thrill-ride makeover by Hollywood motion capture champion Robert Zemeckis (Flight). Saddled with a French accent, Michigan …

Adult Toy Story. Adult as in, the person playing with the toys is an adult: Mark Hogancamp (Steve Carell), an artist who has lost both his memory and his ability to draw following a brutal beating that stems from his drunken barroom admission that he likes to wear women’s shoes. …

Acceptable encore to the ghost stories of the year previous, The Sixth Sense and Stir of Echoes. Fully equal to them in the voltage of the jolts, and even the overall number of them. Emptier of ideas, however; more mechanical in execution; but at the same time sleeker in surface …

In the time-honored tradition of alternate-world fantasies, this posits a post-WWII Hollywood nestled against a borough called Toontown, populated by autonomous cartoon figures. Most of these seem to find employment in the entertainment industry, and all may wander about Hollywood at will and rub elbows with resident humans. The result …

Please excuse the disadvantaged viewpoint, but having never read Roald Dahl’s source novel nor seen Nicolas Roeg’s 1990 big screen adaptation, it’s difficult to determine how much of the dark appeal of Robert Zemeckis’ remake can be attributed to the filmmaker. The setting’s been modified from England to Alabama at …