Contributor: Bob Smithouser

Mulan

The title character is sweet, smart, strong, noble, and the most modest heroine to inhabit a Disney cartoon since “Beauty and the Beast.”

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Bandits

The film does a good job of making ignoble characters sympathetic, inspiring viewers to side with three criminals and one adulteress, while jeering local law enforcement.

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Punk Rebels Face Prison

My grandfather used to say, “If you don’t think, you feel.” He was right. A case in point, the birthday-party parent on America’s Funniest Videos who decides to adjust the piñata after he’s handed the stick to a blindfolded 8-year-old. Ouch! But someti …

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Orange County

Do teens really need another coming-of-age comedy that plumbs for laughs with vulgarity, homosexuality and substance abuse?

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Stuart Little 2

Two years after the events of the first film, we find Stuart fully acclimated into the pristine Little clan.

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Stigmata

Father Kiernan is less a man of faith than a man of science. He’s paid by the Vatican to investigate unusual phenomena …

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Worst Earworms Ever

Have you ever had a nasty case of earworms? Don’t get grossed out. That simply means you’ve had a catchy song stuck in your head that keeps looping uncontrollably. Like dinner guests still showing off their vacation photos after midnight, it just … won …

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Lucky Numbers

Lucky Numbers is a black comedy about rotten people doing rotten things to each other, all in the name of greed.

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Crossroads

Here is a movie that is free-spirited, melodramatic hokum for Britney Spears fans and Britney Spears fans alone.

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The Truman Show

Jim Carrey is a naive insurance salesman whose humdrum existence is, unbeknownst to him, being telecast live around the globe 24 hours a day.

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Seventeen’s Pledge: Do You Buy It?

Julia Bluhm is one of my heroes. Recently, the 14-year-old took on Seventeen magazine, armed only with an online petition and a passion for seeing the mag publish more authentic photos of young women. And she seems to have won that battle. At least tha …

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Murdered Love

P.O.D. still shouts out a wake-up call to unchurched fans of passionate, pile driver rock. But some of those shouts are coarse here, and they’re going to alienate some Christian “Warriors.”

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The Indian in the Cupboard

Imagine owning a cabinet that can bring the toys placed inside to life. For one boy, that fantasy becomes reality in “The Indian in the Cupboard.”

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Bugged by Spidey?

Will the real Spider-Man please stand up? OK, color me conflicted. I’m a long-time Spider-Fan who, on one hand, really enjoyed the new Andrew Garfield reboot, The Amazing Spider-Man. As a film unto itself, Amazing delivers 137 minutes of popcorn-gobbli …

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Mr. Deeds

A sloppy remake of Frank Capra’s 1936 Oscar-winner ‘Mr. Deeds Goes to Town.’

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