In recent years, the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film has come to stand for not much more than a fair level of craftsmanship and a comfortable pitch of moral predicament (The Secret In Their Eyes, Departures, and The Counterfeiters are the most recent undistinguished winners).  This year’s winner, Susanne Bier’s IN A BETTER WORLD, […]

      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 […]

      GONE:  Not Even For Free – Gone?  Not Soon Enough   When was the last time you saw a non-ironic, non-parody movie where someone was sneaking around in a room belonging to a possible villain, searching in almost total silence for evidence in the recesses of a dark closet, when–literally!–a cat came […]

> Worth a Ticket:  A funny, moving story about navigating the twists of life.   Mike Mills’ BEGINNERS is about the fumble for love, the wrong turns and mistakes that can delay–although luckily not always prevent–true happiness.  Mills has said that this story is semiautobiographical:  like his protagonist Oliver (Ewan McGregor), Mills learned after the […]

> TEN YEAR, which premiered tonight at the Toronto Film Festival, is one of the few festival movies that has the feel of a potential hit.  This is because, apart from its hugely engaging cast and, to be sure, some effective writing and directing, it’s really not a “film festival” movie at all, but a […]

  POINT BLANK – Worth a Ticket:  A Thrill-Ride with Subtitles   The most gripping Hollywood thriller of the summer is… in French.  (But not for long.)  This isn’t a complete surprise:  POINT BLANK‘s director/co-writer Fred Cavaye may not be a household name, but he made the film Anything For Her, the 96-minute thriller that […]

  TINKER, TAILOR, SOLDIER, SPY:  Worth A Ticket – An Epic of Betrayals   John LeCarre is (I guess one should say “arguably”) the greatest of all spy novelists, and his 1974 TINKER, TAILOR, SOLDIER, SPY is “arguably” his finest work.  Incredibly, the 1979 BBC miniseries adaptation lived up to the level of the novel, […]

> Rodrigo Garcia’s film ALBERT NOBBS (he shares auteurship with Glenn Close, who served as screenwriter with John Banville and Gabriella Prekop and as a producer as well as star) caters to what used to be called the James Ivory audience, when he was still churning his films out. In NY, these are the audiences […]