A BETTER LIFE – Watch It At Home:  Earnest Isn’t Enough   Impending disaster hangs over every early scene of Chris Weitz’s new film A BETTER LIFE.  As soon as we’re introduced to Carlos Galindo (Demian Bichir) and learn that he’s an illegal immigrant, eking out a life as a gardener in Los […]

> Worth a ticket. They say that the definition of madness is repeating the same action with the expectation of a different result.  But that diagnosis doesn’t allow for this:  a man (Jake Gyllenhaal) wakes up and finds himself on a train, where his reflection in the mirror doesn’t look like himself, and the woman […]

  HUGO:  Worth A Ticket – If Only For the Visual Splendors   Paramount doesn’t have much choice but to market Martin Scorsese’s HUGO as a family movie:  it’s got a PG rating, a young boy and girl as the hero and heroine, a children’s book (“The Invention of Hugo Cabret” by Brian Selznick) as […]

    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 […]

  Watch it at home.   The deadliest weapon unleashed in BATTLE LOS ANGELES is its barrage of war-movie cliches. Stop me if you’ve heard this before, but there’s this rag-tag group of Marines, led by a hard-bitten veteran, that has to go into enemy territory to rescue some civilians before friendly forces bomb the […]

> Watch It At Home:  The God of Thunder Musters a Tinny Roar. Put it this way:  the new superhero epic THOR cost something like $150M to produce, required the diligent services of hundreds of professionals over a period of 2 years, is being presented with all the trappings of IMAX, 3D and super-stereo, and […]

  THE HELP – Worth A Ticket:  The Story May Be Soft, The Acting Isn’t   THE HELP is–and I mean this in a good way–a big-screen Hallmark Hall of Fame.   It’s a long, absorbing, emotionally satisfying piece of mainstream Hollywood moviemaking that skims the surface of its difficult subject–the life of black maids […]

  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 […]