REAL STEEL:  Watch It At Home – The Word is “Clunky”   REAL STEEL wants to be loved so much, it practically walks the audience members to their cars and offers to give them all a lift home.  And yet, the packed house I saw it with could only offer the movie a smattering of […]

  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 […]

  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 […]

  MONTE CARLO:  Watch It At Home – The Usual Tourist Stops   Beware the credit “Screen Story by.”  It means that whatever the original source material for a movie may have been, it’s essentially been abandoned, looted for a single story element that’s now attached to an entirely different script.  In the case of […]

  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 […]

    Airing on TCM March 24 and April 10:  See It On Any Screen.   The legacy of the late Elizabeth Taylor arises at least as much from her stature as one of the great, iconic Hollywood movie stars (and the prototypical tabloid goddess) as on the breadth of her acting skills.  But she […]

> 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 […]

  Michael Lewis’ book Moneyball was a marvelous read, but seemed like dim source material for a movie. Credit, then, is due to the creators of the film version–the various producers, screenwriters Steven Zailian and Aaron Sorkin, and director Bennett Miller–for finding a compelling narrative spine in a true-life story about the change in an […]