>   THE DESCENDANTS:  Worth A Ticket – Flawed But Heartfelt It’s taken an unaccountable 7 years for Alexander Payne to follow up Sideways, the biggest hit of his career,  with THE DESCENDANTS, which will hit theatres in time for a serious awards season push in late November.  Sideways and Payne’s earlier Election are two […]

  CARNAGE:  Watch It At Home – Polanski and All-Star Cast Miss the Bullseye   The trick about CARNAGE, which is based on the Tony Award-winning play God of Carnage by Yasmina Reza, is that despite its pedigree, and the big names usually associated with it, it’s more of a game than a revelation.  The […]

  Worth a ticket.   Tom McCarthy has been carving a modest but very impressive niche for himself in the indie film universe. His films The Station Agent and The Visitor were both superbly written and performed, and he takes a small step toward the commercial mainstream with the new WIN WIN. Paul Giamatti stars […]

> Worth a Ticket; It Wasn’t Broke, They Didn’t Fix It In Hollywood, the word “sequel” is often code for “remake.”  This isn’t news:  the James Bond series has been going on for almost 50 years, and allowing for the occasional change in cast and some fluctuation in quality, it’s pretty much been the same […]

> Worth A Ticket; An often stupendous achievement that courts ridicule–and sometimes earns it. Terrence Malick’s THE TREE OF LIFE is at once the filmmaker’s most emotionally grounded and dizzyingly ambitious film, his most relatable and esoteric piece of work.  In a sense it’s the definitive Malick film, the one that explores his chosen themes […]

> As has been reported, there really was an ambulance outside the Ryerson Theatre in Toronto after the midnight premiere of Alexandre Courtes’ THE INCIDENT, there to rescue at least one person who had fainted during the movie.  Of course, this may just mean that Toronto Film Festival patrons have delicate sensibilities–an idea supported by […]

> 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 […]

>   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 […]