CRAZY STUPID LOVE – Worth A Ticket:  It All Works     Without further ado:  CRAZY STUPID LOVE is the comedy of the summer.  Also the drama.  There are certainly spectacles out there now providing fantastic visual thrills, and some of them (X-Men, Harry Potter) are quite good, too; but if you […]

  COWBOYS & ALIENS – Watch It At Home:  Genre Mash-Up Zaps Itself In the Foot   It’s admirable, in a way, that for much of its length, COWBOYS AND ALIENS is willing to be more of a western than a scifi extravaganza, even though scifi is a safer commercial bet.  The problem is that […]

    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 […]

  SARAH’S KEY – Watch It At Home:  Misses a Difficult Mark     There may be no cinematic minefield more dangerous for filmmakers than the Holocaust.  For films entering that difficult territory, the choices of tone, approach and imagery may not just be called into question, but outright offend audiences, and viewers have very […]

    ANOTHER EARTH – Worth A Ticket:  Tiny Story With Big Ambitions   For ANOTHER EARTH, the Sundance Film Festival went exactly the way it’s supposed to.  The low-key picture was made on a miniscule budget (a few hundred thousand dollars) by complete unknowns, director/cinematographer/editor/co-writer/co-producer Mike Cahill and star/co-writer/co-producer Brit Marling, with far less […]

    CAPTAIN AMERICA:  THE FIRST AVENGER – Worth A Ticket:  Marvel Goes Back To the Future   There’s a certain irony in the fact that, in this summer of Super 8 and its Spielberg rapture, the most successfully Spielbergian movie of the season is Marvel’s CAPTAIN AMERICA:  THE FIRST AVENGER.  Its connection to Steven […]

    FRIENDS WITH BENEFITS – Worth A Ticket:  Almost Great   For about an hour, as you watch his new FRIENDS WITH BENEFITS, you could be forgiven for thinking that writer-director Will Gluck is the future of Hollywood romantic comedy.  Gluck came out of TV with the very underrated Fired Up, about a pair […]

  PROJECT NIM:  Worth A Ticket – If You Can Stand It   At first I wondered why on earth Fox Searchlight hadn’t grabbed James Marsh’s documentary PROJECT NIM at Sundance, to serve as an unofficial prequel to Big Fox’s release of Rise of the Planet of the Apes next month.  It seemed like a […]