Review: “Cats”

1 out of 5 stars. I will never forget where I was when the “Cats” trailer first debuted. It was a warm summer evening, and I was standing in a Starbucks just outside of Dallas, Texas waiting on the latte I’d ordered. Having not been on my phone much all day, I scrolled through Twitter, […]

Review: “Mary Poppins Returns”

3.5 out of 5 stars. Walt Disney’s 1964 film “Mary Poppins” is hugely beloved and widely regarded as the studio’s greatest live-action movie. So despite the fact that author P.L. Travers wrote multiple stories about the magical nanny, it’s still a tall order for Disney to make a sequel to the classic film over 50 […]

Review: “Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again”

3 out of 5 stars. “Mamma Mia!” is the sort of musical that embodies escapism. The story of a daughter trying to identify her father before her wedding day is set on the gorgeous Greek island Kalokairi, far from the troubles of reality, and is filled with peppy songs by ABBA. It’s rather bizarre, even […]

Review: “The Greatest Showman”

2 out of 5 stars. With stars like Hugh Jackman, Michelle Williams, and Zac Efron, a screenplay by Bill Condon and Jenny Bicks, and music by Oscar and Tony winners Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, it’s hard to see how a movie musical like “The Greatest Showman,” based on the life and career of P.T. […]

Review: “Beauty and the Beast” (2017)

4 out of 5 stars. There’s a point in director Bill Condon’s live-action version of Disney’s animated classic “Beauty and the Beast” where I knew right off that I was going to love the movie, and that point comes no more than two or three minutes into the film. The opening sequence that details the […]

Review: “La La Land”

4.5 out of 5 stars. “La La Land” opens with a long tracking shot, the camera moving along bumper-to-bumper traffic on a Los Angeles freeway, a cacophony of sounds and different music emanating from each vehicle—a fairly typical scene, until, one by one, people leap out of their cars, jumping on top of them and […]