’Traveling Pants’ still a good fit for cast

You would think with all the television success Blake Lively, America Ferrera, Amber Tamblyn and Alexis Bledel have had, they would be too big for their britches and would not want to do a sequel to “The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants.”

Luckily for the fans of the books and the feature film, “Pants” is still a good fit for them.

“Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2” is a sweet, sentimental and occasionally funny movie about four female friends linked by a pair of magical pants they pass around like a note in the back of the classroom.

Tibby (Tamblyn, “Joan of Arcadia”) is a film student at NYU. Bridget (Lively, “Gossip Girl”) is spending the summer on an archeological dig in Turkey. Carmen (Ferrera, “Ugly Betty”) is involved with a theater company in Vermont. And Lena (Bledel, “Gilmore Girls”) looks to get her mind off a lost love with some summer art classes.

Each of the friends provides a thread that weaves through the soft texture of the film. There are moments when the thread is dark, and there are times when it is not. But the threads are never boring because of the skill of this cast.

– Rick Bentley, TheFresno Bee

“Brideshead Revisited”

The question is not whether the remake of Evelyn Waugh’s 1945 book is as good, as rich, as deeply satisfying as the landmark 11-hour British TV series of the same name that aired here in 1982, launching the career of a then-unknown Jeremy Irons. How could it be?

Even at more than two hours, this feature-length version of Waugh’s tale of homosexuality, class envy, God and redemption must highlight certain themes, de-emphasizing – or eliminating – others for the sake of brevity.

And so it is that director Julian Jarrold’s take on the idea-rich novel has become a more narrowly focused story of a love triangle.

At the apex stands Charles Ryder (Matthew Goode), a middle-class English atheist who becomes infatuated with the family of Sebastian Flyte (Ben Wishaw), an alcoholic, gay Catholic aristocrat. In the other corner is Sebastian’s sister Julia (Hayley Atwell), a morose beauty with whom Charles begins a doomed affair while the three are traveling in Venice.

To a large degree, the story remains intact, thanks chiefly to Emma Thompson’s chilly turn as Sebastian and Julia’s mother, Lady Marchmain, a sort of Mommie Dearest with a stiff upper lip.

Still hard-hitting and dense, it’s a film whose ideal audience consists of younger viewers who haven’t seen the TV series and who therefore have nothing to compare it to.

– Michael O’Sullivan, The Washington Post

“Brick Lane”

It sometimes seems that there is but one true erotic taboo left in a cinema obsessed with body parts and bodily fluids. And if the taboo of Islamic infidelity was ever going to fall, it would have to happen in a story set outside of the Middle East – in “Bangla City” on Brick Lane in London, for instance.

But “Brick Lane” isn’t some “Desperate Islamic Housewives.” This movie traffics in the eroticism of a glance held too long; a moment’s contact, hand on hand, as a teacup is passed.

As timely as today’s headlines and as sympathetic as any movie about adulterous love can be, “Brick Lane” opens a window on lives many of us wouldn’t give a thought to, and how our Western ways are changing those lives, by design or by accident, one person at a time.

– Roger Moore, The Orlando Sentinel

For times and locations, see page 9.