> Watch It At Home:  The God of Thunder Musters a Tinny Roar. Put it this way:  the new superhero epic THOR cost something like $150M to produce, required the diligent services of hundreds of professionals over a period of 2 years, is being presented with all the trappings of IMAX, 3D and super-stereo, and […]

> Here are capsule summaries of all this year’s SHOWBUZZDAILY Toronto Film Festival reviews, arranged more or less in order of preference.  Click on each title for the full review, and the complete list of all the reviews is here.  SHAME:  Audiences who go to the new film by Steve McQueen (not that one) for […]

    THE MUPPETS:  Watch It At Home – Nonstop Cuteness   When it was announced that Disney’s new movie of THE MUPPETS (the Mouse House bought the entire franchise from Jim Henson’s company some years ago) was going to be written by Jason Segel and Nicholas Stoller, previously behind Forgetting Sarah Marshall (and Stoller […]

  On Homevideo and VOD:  At Home In Your Home Morning Glorydidn’t make Rachel McAdams into the new Julia Roberts/Katherine Heigl/Sandra Bullock (it grossed around $53M worldwide), despite the strong pedigree of having been written by Aline Brosh McKenna (The Devil Wears Prada), and directed by Roger Michell (Notting Hill). It’s not really a romantic […]

> Watch it At Home;  Something Acceptable. As romantic comedies with Kate Hudson go, SOMETHING BORROWED isn’t so bad.  After her spectacular debut in Almost Famous, Hudson’s become something of a brand name for dreadful rom-coms that nevertheless make money (How To Lose A Guy In 10 Days, You, Me & Dupree, Fool’s Gold, My […]

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, […]

> Today, 3 films from first-time directors: Caroline Bottaro’s marvelous QUEEN TO PLAY is, in a sense, a sports movie.  We have the out-of-nowhere player whose newly-discovered talent shakes up her whole life, the wise and somewhat eccentric mentor, even the climactic competition.  The game here, though, is chess, and the film (in French, with […]

  If THE DARK KNIGHT had no superhero or comic book trappings–if The Joker were scarred but not hideously made up, and Batman were a bit lower-tech and merely disguised rather than wearing a cowl and cape–Christopher Nolan’s film would still be one of the best action-adventure crime movies of the past 20 years.  Within […]