Life is Sweet: Criterion Collection
June 10, 2013
For many years, Mike Leigh has been a brilliant and consistent chronicler of the British lower middle working class in cinema. Life is Sweet (1990) was his breakthrough film having cut his teeth previously on plays and television movies where he honed...
Topsy-Turvy: Criterion Collection
March 31, 2011
You have to hand it to Mike Leigh, a filmmaker who has the confidence to make a $20 million period musical with limited commercial appeal. In 1999, he released Topsy-Turvy, a musical drama chronicling W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan’s creation of The...
Enchanted
April 14, 2008
Essentially a reworking of Disney’s animated takes on Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty (while also referencing many others), Enchanted was a surprise hit in 2007 thanks in large part to the irrepressible charms of its leading lady, Amy Adams. Part animated...
Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street: Special Edition
April 14, 2008
An R rated musical about a vengeful barber who kills his victims only to serve them up as meat pies must’ve made the studio a little nervous to bankroll a big budget adaptation of Stephen Sondheim’s award-winning Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of...
Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events
November 16, 2005
Over the last few years children have been treated to the magical tales of Harry Potter through a series of blockbuster novels and movies, but now comes something for those children who found Potter a bit mainstream: a bleak, askew story of gothic proportions,...
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
June 14, 2005
At first, it seems like rather an odd choice picking the director of the racy, coming-of-age road movie, Y tu mamá también (2001), to direct the latest Harry Potter movie, The Prisoner of Azkaban (2004). Studios are notoriously protective of their cash...
The Last Samurai
February 19, 2003
The one-two punch of The Last Samurai (2003) and Kill Bill, Vol. 1 (2003) marks a surprising mini-resurgence of the samurai movie genre. When most people think of examples from this type of movie, the first ones that come to mind are Seven Samurai (1954)...
