A NEW YORK WINTER’S TALE – Review by MaryAnn Johanson

Thank you, Winter’s Tale movie — aka A New York Winter’s Tale in the U.K. in order that, I suspect, it not be confused with Shakespeare, which was never going to happen — for confirming what I’ve always felt about the weasel phrase “magic realism”: that it is a feeble, lazy attempt to dress up in literary pretensions an inability to fully commit to fantasy. This might not be true of the Mark Helprin novel this is based on; I haven’t read it and can’t comment in that direction. But it most certainly true of Akiva Goldsman’s leaden, charmless adaptation, which appears to believe that it can get away with making not one lick of sense at all, because Magic Realism. Read more>>