Am I alone in feeling a little empty after reading all the obligatory year-end and decade-end “best of” lists in the past couple of weeks? Accompanying the articles declaring the “Aughts” to be “a lost decade” and bidding the recession-fallout year of ’09 good riddance were top-ten lists that puffed the half-baked “Wall-E” or retreated…

It’s okay to borrow a title from Lady Gaga once in a while, right? Because in this case, ‘Leap Year,’ the new Amy Adams/Matthew Goode “romantic” “comedy” (notice how both those words are in quotation marks) can only be rightly called a bad romance. Bad in the sense that it has about as much life,…

Movie Mom was the first critic to make me aware of the sleeper romantic drama “Adam” which played in very limited release last summer. The understated tone of this movie probably had a lot to do with why it didn’t get the attention it deserved at the box office, but now the movie is out…

Katherine Paterson is one of my all-time favorite children’s writers. Author of the beloved “Bridge to Terabithia,” which won the Newbery Medal for Young People’s Literature, and so many other childhood favorites, like “The Great Gilly Hopkins,” Paterson took office this week as the second National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature–and I couldn’t be happier.…

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