> Worth A Ticket. Of all the “Friends” who kept America company in its collective living room for a decade, David Schwimmer has taken the most concerted step away from the work that made him famous.  While Courtney Cox, Matthew Perry, Matt LeBlanc and Lisa Kudrow have mostly continued in TV comedy, and Jennifer Aniston’s […]

> One of the enduring questions of Madonna’s illustrious quarter-century career is how someone so brilliant in managing every other facet of her persona has consistently made such terrible decisions when it comes to movies.  It’s the one medium where she’s never succeeded, and even when she’s occasionally done something right, she instantly follows it […]

    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 […]

    THE IDES OF MARCH:  Watch It At Home – An Excellent Play Becomes a Merely Good Movie   The Ides of March, one of the most eagerly awaited of this year’s festival crop, is more entertaining than it is good. Oddly both low-key and melodramatic, claptrap and high-minded drama, it represents a series […]

  CHRONICLE – Worth A Ticket –  “Found Footage” That Deserves to Be Found   Over the past decade, audience hunger for “reality”–the word very much in quotation marks–has engulfed much of popular cultture, from YouTube videos to self-produced songs, from tweets to television series and even cable networks built around people playing manipulated versions […]

> Watch It At Home:  Petty larceny. Sometimes casting can be too good:  Keanu Reeves playing a guy who pretty much sleepwalks through his own life is practically redundant.  His whole style, from the very start of his career in the Bill and Ted pictures (more than 20 years ago!), has been to lag a […]

> When the announcement was made that Warner Bros would split HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS into 2 full-length movies, there was a certain amount of cynicism about studio greed–and, indeed, why not pick up an extra billion or so if the opportunity arises?  But really, J.K. Rowling’s novels have all been stuffed so […]

  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 […]