Olsen Sisters Hit Theaters; Van Helsing Hunts for a Plot
May 7 -- Now in theaters: New York Minute, Mean Girls and Van Helsing.
New York Minute
In New York Minute, Ashley Olsen is a neat freak and sister Mary-Kate is her exact opposite. Ashley's bent on winning a scholarship to Oxford. Mary-Kate wants just as badly to be a rock star. Fate throws them together on the Long Island Rail Road on their way to New York City.
Slickly produced, New York Minute isn't a bad film. The much-anticipated girl-meets-boy scenes are appropriate, even wholesome. But the other tweener features out this spring — 13 Going on 30, Ella Enchanted and Mean Girls — are much better films, funnier, savvier and a whole lot easier for grown-ups to sit through.
New York Minute runs an hour and a half. But if you're over 14, it will seem like 2½. Grade: C
Mean Girls
Mean Girls is a much better bet for tweeners and especially their parents. Like School of Rock, even if you don't like this type of movie, you're going to find this movie enjoyable.
As a home-schooled kid who moves to Chicago from Africa, Lindsay Lohan is clueless when it comes to the unforgiving social order of a public high school cafeteria. What's more, this funny coming-of-age film is in a league with Clueless.
Saturday Night Live has created another big-screen star: Tina Fey wrote the script and plays the teacher. She could teach the folks who wrote New York Minute a thing or two, in a New York minute. Grade: B+
Van Helsing
With a $150 million budget, video game tie-ins, and a TV series already in the works, there's an awful lot at stake in Van Helsing, and judging from the bursts of unintended laughter at the screening I attended (some of which, I must confess, came from me), this is a horror of a film of epic proportions.
Related Stories
ABC News Live