> Worth A Ticket; Birds Fly High Enough for Kids, and Adults Too. Click For More Reviews: THOR    PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN 4    MIDNIGHT IN PARIS Animation has, over the past decade, passed beyond being merely a movie genre to a veritable industry within the industry.  Every studio is in the business now, making films […]

> Watch It At Home People complain that Hollywood doesn’t take risks, but Universal went and hired the director of Alvin and the Chipmunks to make a movie about a musical-minded, free-spirit digitally animated character who upturns the life of an ordinary guy… talk about pushing the envelope!  (In fairness, Alvin was a chipmunk singer, […]

  The year’s Top 10 movies are here, and a variety of honorable mentions are here.  But now for something completely different… Along with the egg nog and tinsel, there’s a certain undeniable seasonal pleasure to be had in singling out the truly spectacular misses of the movie year for some shame and ridicule.  We […]

> 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 […]

> Watch It At Home; A circus story that’s not the greatest show in the multiplex. Sometimes even a small moment in a movie can typify how it’s gone wrong.  There’s a scene fairly early in WATER FOR ELEPHANTS–it’s not a major plot point, for those wary of spoilers–where an animal loved by the circus […]

> Worth A Ticket; A tasty croissant from Woody Allen. Woody Allen interrupts the opening credits of his new comedy MIDNIGHT IN PARIS to insert a montage of lovely Paris locations.  I mention this because after more than 40 years and as many films, the rules of Woody-land seem as fixed and immutable as the […]

> Not Even For Free. There’s a key scene in the new SOUL SURFER where the one-armed teen surfer Bethany Hamilton, who’s had her other arm chewed off by a shark and who despairs of her career in competition, is in Thailand on a Christian mission to tend to tsunami survivors.  And these survivors, having […]

>   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 […]