Freedom Writers is based on the true story of
Long Beach gangbanger teenagers who were encouraged to put their angst
to paper in the charged years following the 1992 Los Angeles riots.

Writer-director Richard LaGravenese leans heavily on the grooves of audience expectation
established by the estimable screen canon of insistent mentors butting heads with
cynical and otherwise hardened urban teens — movies like Stand and
Deliver, Lean on Me, and, yes, 1995’s Dangerous Minds. Still, a
critic’s heart isn’t automatically a hardened one, and on balance
there’s more good than bad here. For the full review, from CityBeat, click here and scroll down.

It was Shrek, of course, that most colorfully laid low fairy-tale
conventions: now, into the valley between its highly lucrative sequels
steps the like-minded animated offering Happily N’Ever After, ostensibly a satirical
retelling of the Cinderella story. The two films share a producer, and
perhaps that’s why this colorful and clamorous but hardly inspired
effort seems predominantly made up of recycled concepts and jokes from
that franchise. Its story, a stop-and-start farrago of half-baked
ideas, finds lowly servant Rick (Freddie Prinze, Jr.) wooing Ella (Sarah Michelle Gellar) away from a vapid Prince Charming and saving Fairy Tale Land from Ella’s wicked stepmother, Frieda (Sigourney Weaver). For the full review, from CityBeat, click here and scroll down.