Review - Into the Woods

Often I wish more than anything... more than life... that Hollywood would provide us with more movie musicals than it currently does. We musical theatre lovers are lucky if we can get one live-action song-and-dance film a year. Luckier yet if its a good one.

It puts me in a situation as sticky as pitch when it comes to evaluating the big screen adaptation of a stage musical that I don't love nearly as much as the genre it represents. The show in question is Sondheim & Lapine's Into the Woods, translated into cinematic form by director Rob Marshall (Chicago, Nine) and positioned as Disney's big holiday season draw.

The original production which debuted on Broadway in 1988 could best be described as a revisionist fairytale: The paths of various familiar Grimm characters intersect en route to their storybook endings as they venture through the woods. Among them are Cinderella (Anna Kendrick), Jack of eventual beanstalk infamy (Daniel Huttlestone), Red Riding Hood (Lilla Crawford), a baker and his wife (James Corden and Emily Blunt), a pair of vain if charming princes (Chris Pine and Billy Magnussen), and a scheming witch (Meryl Streep).

Review - Star Trek Into Darkness

After an auspicious blastoff in 2009, J.J. Abrams keeps the success of his Star Trek reboot burning strong with Star Trek Into Darkness, a slick summer actioner that takes off at warp speed and rarely lets up.

All the cast members from the original are back in fine form (including Abrams' nettlesome blue lens flares): Chris Pine as Kirk, Zachary Quinto as Spock, Zoe Saldana as Uhura, Simon Pegg as Scotty, Karl Urban as 'Bones' McCoy, John Cho as Sulu, Anton Yelchin as Chekov, and Bruce Greenwood as Cpt. Pike. All of them excelled in 2009's origin story, but with their characters now firmly established, the writing team of Damon Lindelof, Roberto Orci, and Alex Kurtzman devote more time to developing the spiky but loving Kirk-Spock dynamic that is very much the heart of the franchise. Personifying the conflicting philosophies between logic and instinct, these two foils make this one of the more thematically compelling popcorn flicks you're likely to see this summer, at least whenever it takes the time to stop and breathe.