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| EVER AFTER (1998) - PG
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SBD Star Rating:
by Lew Irwin
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For a costume drama based on a fairy tale, it may not offer the traditional magic of filmmakers -- Disney especially -- but critics generally agree that Ever After, starring Drew Barrymore, provides an extraordinary enchantment of its own. Rita Kempley in today's (Friday) Washington Post calls it, "a dazzling, de-Disneyfied rendering of the Cinderella story." Robert Dominguez in the New York Daily News writes that the film is "a delightfully charming take on Cinderella that will do for Drew Barrymore what Pretty Woman did for Julia Roberts -- make her a bankable, romantic-comedy star." Eleanor Ringel in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution praises director Andy Tennant for "putting a delicious spin on the familiar tale of a girl, a prince and a slipper." The film, however, is turned into a pumpkin and mice by a number of critics, including Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times, who says that it tends "toward being too insistently endearing and pleased with itself." Susan Wloszczyna in USA Today writes that the film's attempt to modernize the fairy tale ends up as "too much talk, not enough wooing." Stephen Holden in the New York Times dismisses the movie as a "bland, sappy costume comedy" while Rod Dreher in the New York Post gives it the gong when he remarks: "Relevant, Shmelevant -- this kind of ill-executed modernization shoos out the magic that provides fairy tales with their enduring appeal.
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