FINAL DESTINATION 5 – Watch It At Home:  Death Takes No Holiday   There’s only one thing worth mentioning in FINAL DESTINATION 5… and it’s the one thing I can’t talk about.  Let’s just say that if you’ve been a follower of the series all along, the filmmakers (whether it was screenwriter Eric Heisserer […]

    TOWER HEIST:  Watch It At Home – Hardly Luxury-Class   There may never have been a director more proud of being a hack than Brett Ratner.  In a recent NY Times profile, Ratner boasts (when he’s not going on about his friendship with Roman Polanski, because yeah, there’s a social relationship you’d want […]

> Worth a Ticket. HANNA may be the first movie not based on a graphic novel to feel like it is.  Written by Seth Lochhead and David Farr (the first film for both) and directed by Joe Wright, it has the feel of a film conceived in visual rather than dramatic terms, more concerned with […]

> Derick Martini’s HICK is like a Sundance movie that took the wrong indie-film exit and wound up in Toronto.  For whatever reason, Toronto’s film festival tends to find itself with fewer stories of young people from small towns who come of age on the road, so Hick has a little air of distinction here. […]

  It was all so cute when it started… David Yates’ 2009 HARRY POTTER AND THE HALF-BLOOD PRINCE is surprisingly funny at times–surprising, because in all other ways the film was, up to that point, by far the grimmest entry in the series.  It’s curiously structured:  part romantic comedy, complete with love potions and pining […]

    MELANCHOLIA – Watch It At Home – The Title Tells the Tale   Here’s a quick primer in Oscar rules and how studios can get around them.  In order for a film to be Oscar-eligible (other than in a few special categories like Documentary and Foreign Film), it needs a theatrical release in […]

> Worth a Ticket:  A funny, moving story about navigating the twists of life.   Mike Mills’ BEGINNERS is about the fumble for love, the wrong turns and mistakes that can delay–although luckily not always prevent–true happiness.  Mills has said that this story is semiautobiographical:  like his protagonist Oliver (Ewan McGregor), Mills learned after the […]

  HORRIBLE BOSSES – Watch It At Home:  Doesn’t Earn A Raise   A comedy can get away with not being very good as long as it’s funny, and HORRIBLE BOSSES delivers some laughs.  Most of those come from the chemistry between stars Jason Bateman, Jason Sudeikis and Charlie Day, and since the funniest bits […]