HAYWIRE:  Worth A Ticket – For the Gasp-Inducing Fight Scenes Alone   You might think that if a major, celebrated filmmaker were to take the extraordinary step of announcing, years in advance, that he had set the time for his retirement from movies, and that, even though he was only middle-aged, he would […]

> In just her second feature film as a director (her first was 2006’s Oscar-nominated Away From Her), Sarah Polley demonstrates that she’s already a filmmaker with rare grace and sensuality in TAKE THIS WALTZ, which premiered tonight at the Toronto Film Festival.  Blessed with yet another superb lead performance by Michelle Williams, Polley’s film […]

    Worth a ticket.   In movies, as in life, when someone is offered an illicit miracle drug that seems too good to be true, it usually is. So the general narrative arc of LIMITLESS doesn’t come as a huge surprise. What is surprising is that Neil Burger’s film, predicted to be the highest […]

  DON’T BE AFRAID OF THE DARK – Not Even For Free:  No, Really–Don’t Be Afraid     FilmDistrict has gone out of its way to identify co-writer/co-producer Guillermo del Toro with DON’T BE AFRAID OF THE DARK, to the extent that from the marketing, one could easily fail to realize that the movie is […]

  TINKER, TAILOR, SOLDIER, SPY:  Worth A Ticket – An Epic of Betrayals   John LeCarre is (I guess one should say “arguably”) the greatest of all spy novelists, and his 1974 TINKER, TAILOR, SOLDIER, SPY is “arguably” his finest work.  Incredibly, the 1979 BBC miniseries adaptation lived up to the level of the novel, […]

> Not Even For Free. There’s a key scene in the new SOUL SURFER where the one-armed teen surfer Bethany Hamilton, who’s had her other arm chewed off by a shark and who despairs of her career in competition, is in Thailand on a Christian mission to tend to tsunami survivors.  And these survivors, having […]

>   Watch It At Home:  That’s MR. Spielberg To You JJ Abrams’ SUPER 8 is the Beatlemania of Steven Spielberg movies.   Abrams is no doubt absolutely genuine in his reverence for classics from the 1970s and 80s like Jaws, Close Encounters, ET, Poltergeist and The Goonies, all produced or directed by the master–Abrams […]

> If you were going to describe the films of Terence Davies (Distant Voices, Still Lives, The Long Day Closes, The House of Mirth) in one word, that word would not be “dynamic.”  Or “kinetic.”  Or, well, “exciting.”  Davies directs stately tableaux, impressive and sometimes moving, but rooted in nostalgia and regret. Which is why […]