Even his name, Giacomo Casanova, with its lovely rhythms and hint of a sigh, sounds like seduction. Try saying it without smiling as you savor the memory or, more precisely, the legend of this trickster Romeo, bogus aristocrat, and genuine original, a man (perhaps character is a more appropriate word) about whom nothing was ever quite as it seemed, but who deserves better than the lame, preachy mess that is Lasse Hallstrom’s dreadful new movie. To start with, Mr. Hallstrom’s “Casanova” fails miserably in its attempts to be sexy, which is, given its subject matter, a remarkable achievement, roughly akin [...]

As all too many of us have discovered, to be unlucky in love is unlovely, but it’s only the saddest of suitors who ends up in a heap at the bottom of a skyscraper, riddled with bullets and circled by gawpers. Poor, mighty, helpless Kong. When he fell for Ann Darrow all those years ago, he fell hard: “It wasn’t the airplanes. It was Beauty killed the Beast.” So it was, but who can blame an ape for trying? Life on Skull Island was dull, dull, dangerous and dull. Sure, there was a constant supply of comely native girls to [...]

If there’s one thing that Brits of the old school didn’t appreciate, it was a fuss, and if there’s one thing we know about the repressed, eccentric, and misogynistic C.S. Lewis, it’s that he was a Brit of the old school. Nevertheless, it’s easy to imagine that Lewis, a man who relished vigorous debate, would have enjoyed the fuss that has newly enveloped his Narnia in controversy, rancor, and – from the faithful – fresh adulation. As scolds scold, his vision is sexist, Anglocentric, and – fashionably – maybe even Islamophobic. The Narnia stories are, allegedly, cunning and deceitful propaganda [...]